<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Fullmetal Ghostrider by rokhal</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620273">Fullmetal Ghostrider</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal'>rokhal</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Fullmetal Ghostrider [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Ghost Rider (Comics)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Fullmetal Alchemist 2003/Brotherhood Fusion, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Amputation, Cars, Classic Cars, Gabe Reyes has ADHD, Gen, Human-to-Car Transformation, Road Trips, Robbie Reyes Has PTSD, Transformation</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 17:20:58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>35,936</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23620273</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Gabe is a runaway truant with no legs and Robbie is the Hell Charger. Because Alchemy.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Fullmetal Ghostrider [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1664023</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Grease Lightening</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>It was almost eight in the evening, and Gabe Reyes was making dinner.</p><p>He’d had two peanut butter and banana sandwiches already, and done…most of his school work—okay, about three quarters of each of his assignments were done, except for History, but he’d get to that, he rarely got to sleep before midnight anyway—and right now he wished these onions would <em>hurry the fuck up and cook already</em> because Robbie was supposed to be getting out of work any time now, and also he was hungry again. He was seriously considering pouring out half the water in the other saucepan so it would boil faster and he could dump the macaroni in.</p><p>He heard Robbie’s Neon backfiring as it slowed to pull into their driveway. The kitchen table was covered in books. But Gabe had <em>started dinner.</em> This was good. He was almost halfway through making dinner. He was more than half-way through his homework. This was also good. And Robbie had gotten out of work sort-of-on-time. Again, good.</p><p>Robbie shuffled into the apartment, piercings in his lips and ears, bags under his eyes, and a bandage on his knuckles. “Hey, Gabe. Smells delicious. You do your homework?”</p><p>Gabe’s shoulders hunched, even though he’d <em>done </em>it for once this time. “Almost done. You punch somebody again?”</p><p>“Car,” Robbie said, also hunching, which probably meant he'd skinned his knuckles while using a wrench, rather than that he'd punched a car; Robbie would never strike an innocent vehicle. He reached the kitchen table and poked through Gabe’s papers. Found a big sheet of printer paper, with a hexagon in a circle with Greek letters around the edges. “Gabe—”</p><p>“I’m <em>almost done,</em>” Gabe insisted. “I was working on that in between doing the other stuff. Like, as a break. I was using a timer.” He yanked his phone out of his pocket, waved it at Robbie: a refurbished IPhone 5 Robbie had bought him for Christmas two years ago. “I’m working. I started dinner. I’m trying—”</p><p>“I know,” Robbie said, his ass thumping down on one of the kitchen chairs, his head drooping toward his knees. “Sorry, I know you’re trying. You’re so smart, Gabe, I just want you to do well so you don’t get stuck here.”</p><p>“It’s not so bad,” Gabe said, which was not true. They had many nice neighbors, but nobody actually wanted to live in their neighborhood. You had to watch over your shoulder walking around outside, and it wasn’t safe to leave the apartment after dark, full-stop. Also, there was a red-light camera at the nearest intersection and the yellow light only stayed lit for maybe two seconds. Robbie had already gotten a ticket in the mail.</p><p>Robbie stared up at him wearily. He had thick, jagged eyebrows with a scar through one of them, and he always looked angry even when he was just tired.</p><p>“Anyway, I think I’ve got enough of this figured out to actually do it, but the textbook says you need a partner and a fire-extinguisher,” Gabe added, picking up the diagram.</p><p>“Sounds promising,” Robbie said sarcastically, but Gabe had noticed him perking up faintly at the mention of the fire-extinguisher. “Have you figured out how you want to add it to your next campaign yet?”</p><p>Gabe gave the onions a guilty stir. “I dunno. It’s been so long, Ty’s probably bored of it anyway.”</p><p>“That’s ridiculous, you guys had a great time,” Robbie argued. “You made that whole country, and like a whole monetary system, and Ty made that, uh, half-orc sorceress that he was all excited about, and what about Javier and Nita, their characters had all that psychological drama—what if you just did a mini-campaign. You don’t have to top yourself every time. Or maybe somebody else could DM.”</p><p>“Maybe,” Gabe said. “I just want to <em>try</em> something. I think, if I could actually do any of this stuff, and know how it feels, I’d be able to integrate it into the game system in a more realistic way. And even if I can't do it, I want to practice the set-up.”</p><p>“I thought you needed special equipment, like, a chip in your head,” Robbie remarked, picking up the diagram and flapping it.</p><p>“No, that’s what the government says, but according to the forums, that’s a tracking device so the CIA can blow you away if you take your knowledge and try to defect.”</p><p>“Ouch. Does it pick up alien transmissions, too?”</p><p>“Nope.”</p><p>“Bad deal.” Robbie squinted at the diagram. “I can’t believe it’s this simple.”</p><p>“People’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”</p><p>“Tio Maldito used to mess around with this stuff, but he was ex-military or something, I don't know.”</p><p>Gabe managed to retrieve the second sauce packet from the pasta water. “If he's still around, we could ask him.”</p><p>“Gabe, please don't start this again.”</p><p>“I'm not <em>starting</em> anything,” Gabe insisted. “I'm just saying, it's a super weird coincidence for us to have no living relatives. Like, really, none? Nobody? Mom's side <em>or </em>Dad's side? Nobody down South even?”</p><p>“It'll be fifteen years next month,” Robbie snapped. “There's nobody. Let it go.”</p><p>Gabe let it go. He cut the end off the tube of ground beef and squelched half of it into the pan with the onions, then added some flavor powder as he smashed it around. Robbie nudged him aside to take over the stirring, and Gabe sat back at the table, staring blankly at all his assignments.</p><p>“How about history,” Robbie suggested, and Gabe growled.</p><p>He stared at Chapter 14 until the Hamburger Helper was done, then he and Robbie stacked the papers on one side of the table so they had space to eat dinner. Gabe propped up his history textbook, which was more tolerable to read while he was stuck doing something else, like eating. Robbie washed the dishes, Gabe switched to physics, and then Gabe's homework-timer went off. “Yes!”</p><p>“What now?” Robbie asked warily.</p><p>“Help me move the table.”</p><p>They picked up the kitchen table and walked it out toward the living room, so as not to scratch the linoleum, and Gabe grabbed a piece of string, a tub of margarine, and a canister of Morton salt. Gabe packed a scoop of margarine into a sandwich bag, cut a hole in one corner, and piped margarine out onto the floor in a circle while Robbie anchored one end of the string in the center. Then Gabe squinted at the floor from several angles, carefully added six more dots of margarine, and connected them to make a hexagon on the inside. Between the circle and the sides of the hexagon he drew symbols for combustion and oxidation, and in one area he erased parts of the circle and added two eight-inch-wide circles in the margins. Then he dusted the area with salt and blew on it so it rolled against the margarine and stuck there.</p><p>“You’re helping clean this up,” Robbie said.</p><p>“I know, I got it. Where’s the fire extinguisher?”</p><p>“Car.”</p><p>Robbie went out to his Neon, which really did need a fire extinguisher because it had some electrical problems he’d still not sorted out and also there was a slight risk of it blowing a gasket from its recently installed turbocharger. Gabe set the rest of the margarine tub down in the center of the circle, beside their only ceramic dinner plate and a pack of matches.</p><p>“What’s with the margarine?” Robbie asked when he returned.</p><p>“I could’ve used paint,” Gabe said.</p><p>Robbie’s eyebrows went up, <em>point taken.</em></p><p>“Plus, salt’s recommended for first-timers. Same with the palm circles, it’s a safety thing.”</p><p>“Safety first.”</p><p>They stared down at the mess of grease and salt on the floor. Robbie yanked the pin out of his fire extinguisher.</p><p>“Okay,” Gabe said at last, kneeling down by the two little circles he’d made in the edge of the big diagram. He lit one match and set it down on the dinner plate, burning. “Here goes.”</p><p>“Shouldn't we be chanting or something?” Robbie interrupted. The match went out.</p><p>Gabe glared at him. “That's for magic.”</p><p>Robbie waved at the salt circle, the symbols.</p><p>“Magic's not real.”</p><p>Robbie snorted. But he kept hold of the fire extinguisher.</p><p>Gabe lit another match, set his palms down in the circles, and—his mind went blank. He was supposed to be envisioning the heat of the match and the oxygen in the air combining with the margarine to produce CO2, heat, and light in an exothermic and very straight-forward oxidation reaction, but instead, he thought <em>it's too important,</em> and <em>I can't concentrate when it's important,</em> and <em>what if I don't have the talent?</em> And the match went out.</p><p>Gabe felt a cold wash of shame and disappointment. But he lit another match. Try again. Heat, oxygen, oil, <em>concentrate, concentrate.</em></p><p>“Air, fuel, and fire,” Robbie murmured behind him. “Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.”</p><p>The asshole was chanting. Chanting some gearhead thing.</p><p>Heck, for all Gabe knew, this <em>was</em> magic, some online roleplay meme he'd blundered into without the context and taken for truth. Forget “reversal of entropy,” forget “Platonic forms and the effect of information on physical processes,” this was a kid's game and he'd roped Robbie into it, and what a joke because Robbie hadn't had time for games for about ten years. He'd finally gotten Robbie to do something that wasn't cars, housework, or punk rock, and it was some stupid Slenderman ritual he'd found online—<em>heat, oxygen, oil: oxidization, heat, light.</em></p><p>Something rushed through him. It was like his body was a screen door letting a breeze stir up the dust in a musty old house. His hair blew back, light flared red through his closed eyelids, and he opened his eyes. The diagram was shining, harsh glinting light-and-dark like a seam in space, the kitchen lit up white, Robbie stood beside him clutching the fire extinguisher, and in the center of the ring, <em>the margarine was on fire.</em></p><p>A five-foot plume of flame leapt up from the canister and Robbie shot it with the fire extinguisher. Gabe tipped back and fell on his tailbone, elated.</p><p>“The fire,” Robbie said, pointing the extinguisher back and forth from the foam-covered margarine tub to the sodden match. “It <em>jumped.</em> From the match. Did you see that? It—”</p><p>“I had my eyes closed,” Gabe laughed. “Why—I can’t believe I did <em>magic</em> and I had my <em>eyes closed—</em>”</p><p>“Magic’s not real,” Robbie countered, setting down the fire extinguisher. “Holy shit, magic’s real. Alchemy, whatever-the-fu—fudge.”</p><p>“Robbie, you gotta try,” Gabe ordered, standing with a wince. “It runs in families, maybe you can do it too, you gotta try.”</p><p>“I haven’t studied any of this stuff,” Robbie protested. “And the circle’s all wet.”</p><p>“I’ll get a towel.” Gabe ran to the bathroom, came back with a holey bath towel and carefully blotted the foam off the circle of margarine, scooped suds out of the warm oil in the canister with a mug and dumped it in the trash.</p><p>“I haven’t studied this stuff, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. Gabe? What do I do?”</p><p>Gabe squinted down at the circle. A couple of symbols were smudged and there was a gap in the line; he patched them with some more margarine, another sprinkle of salt. “Just focus on what you were saying. Air, fuel, fire. You gotta, like, visualize the chemical reaction you want to happen. It’s easy. This is like the easiest transmutation there is, that’s why it’s an aptitude test. You did great in chemistry, right?”</p><p>“I did fine.” Robbie had done great in chemistry. Robbie was great at basically everything. He could just sit down with a book, read the whole thing in one go, and pass a test on it the next day. It was incredibly annoying, especially since he always insisted that <em>Gabe</em><span> had to go to college after graduating.</span></p><p>“Sit down, concentrate, put your hands in the circles.” Gabe lit Robbie a fresh match and set it down on the dinner plate. “Come on. If we can do this together, it'd be so awesome!”</p><p>Robbie knelt in the circle with his hands on the floor. “Get ready.”</p><p>Gabe grabbed the fire extinguisher.</p><p>“Okay,” Robbie said, narrowing his eyes at the match. “Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.”</p><p>The match went out. Gabe lit him another one.</p><p>“Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.”</p><p>“You got this.”</p><p>“Air, fuel, and fire.”</p><p>The flame of the match streaked upward, a ribbon of yellow light. “You're doing it! You feel it, like it's moving through you?”</p><p>Robbie's eyes were huge. The circle began to glow, the crudely-drawn shapes and symbols sharpening into ragged borders of light and shadow. Gabe saw the moment when Robbie finally threw himself into the transmutation: he started to grin, the circle flared, and the flame streaked toward the tub of margarine. “Air, fuel, and fire. Air, fuel, and fire.” The flame hit the cooking fat, and a fireball the size of a watermelon burst into being in the middle of the circle—</p><p>Gabe aimed the fire extinguisher. The fireball dissipated into smoke and dissipated toward the ceiling, but then another fireball formed—puff, gone, burn, puff, gone, burn, puff, gone.</p><p>Robbie laughed, and then the next fireball was bigger, way too big, and Robbie's laugh cut off, he yanked his hands back from the circle, yelled, “Gabe!” and Gabe shot foam all over the floor.</p><p>“Wow,” Robbie said shakily, when the grease fire went out. The kitchen floor was a disaster.</p><p>“Show-off,” Gabe said. “We did it! Robbie, this is so awesome!”</p><p>“We can control fire,” Robbie said, his eyes still wide. He sat on the floor, stunned like he'd just had a religious experience. “We can <em>control fire.</em><span>”</span></p><p>“<span>We can control a lot more than that once we get further into the curriculum,” Gabe told him. He had almost a gigabyte of bootlegged Alchemy textbooks on his laptop.</span></p><p>“<span>We can control fire,” Robbie repeated, with his <em>completely normal attention span</em>. “I can run crazy boost on the Neon without worrying about engine knock. I can get complete combustion on every power stroke. </span><em>I can make the Neon go so fucking fast.</em><span>”</span></p><p>“<span>Okay, Robbie,” Gabe said. “You do that, I'll be over here turning lead into gold and building my own Gundam.”</span></p><p>“<span>You can do that?”</span></p><p>
  <span>Gabe shrugged. “It's basically counterfeiting, so. Probably a bad idea. But I'm sure there's tons of stuff I can do with it to earn extra money that's legal.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Robbie shook his head, pushed himself to his feet, and started to mop up the fire retardant foam and margarine with the bath towel. “No, don't worry about that. I mean the Gundam.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Gabe flushed. “I don't know if I </span>
  <em>can,</em>
  <span>” he admitted. “I'd have to design a Gundam. But you can do all kinds of stuff with Alchemy. It's basically controlling chemical reactions, and everything's made out of chemicals.”</span>
</p><p>“I gotta learn to control fire,” Robbie insisted. “I mean, <em>really</em><span> control fire. Like, down to the millisecond.”</span></p><p>“<span>I'm not sure human brains work fast enough for what you're thinking of doing,” Gabe said, blinking at him. </span></p><p>“<span>I'll get a rhythm. I'll figure it out.” Robbie was...he was excited. He was happy. He was psyched. Gabe couldn't remember Robbie acting like this since he'd gotten a gig roadie-ing for </span><em>Almas Perdidas</em><span> on the weekends last summer. </span></p><p>“<span>I'll get my laptop, maybe there's a diagram for finer control,” Gabe suggested. He was halfway to his bedroom when the timer on his phone went off.</span></p><p>
  <span>Time for history again. He stopped in the middle of the hallway and banged his head against the wall.</span>
</p><p>“<span>Sunday,” Robbie yelled from the kitchen.</span></p><p>“<span>What?”</span></p><p>“<span>Let's work on this Sunday.”</span></p><p>“<span>Really?” Gabe squinted. Robbie spent most Sundays in a near-coma, catching up on sleep. Gabe did, too.</span></p><p>“<span>This is awesome,” Robbie said, over the squelching sounds of him shuffling the towel around on the floor with his feet. “And we don't do anything fun together anymore. I kinda miss that about your D&amp;D thing, you know?”</span></p><p>
  <span>Gabe had no idea Robbie had enjoyed his D&amp;D sessions with Ty and the others; Robbie had never participated, just hovered in the background and made snacks. “Yeah,” Gabe agreed. “Sunday.”</span>
</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Secret Garage</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>As Robbie and Gabe get further into Alchemy, they need more space to practice in. Robbie knows an abandoned pole-barn...which turns out to be oddly familiar.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The tall dry weeds and juniper hedge screened off the surrounding homes and nearly obscured the street, a square jungle devouring a long-vanished civilization. But within was only a rusting pole-barn sharing a vacant lot with a tall spiny oak tree and a precarious tire-swing. Robbie had a faint, pastel-colored memory of being pushed on a swing just like it, before everything, and falling off. After Mom and Dad had disappeared, he'd only ever pushed Gabe, nobody had pushed Robbie, so he knew it was from before. He eased the Neon past the tree, over the half-vanished gravel drive, and parked nice and square in front of the roll-down door like he owned the place. He looked around: no cameras, no footpaths worn in the weeds except for what appeared to be an abandoned homeless camp against one side of the garage. Then he and Gabe got out and got to work busting in.</p><p>There were two doors to the pole-barn, a roll-down number two cars wide, and an ordinary house door on one opposite corner. Rusting vents along the ridgeline promised that if they ever got into the place, it might not be completely stifling. The roll-down door probably bolted all the way behind the sheet metal wall, with the bolts apparently running through load-bearing poles. Robbie concentrated on the house-door. There was no give at all when he rattled it, and the deadbolt appeared to be surprisingly good quality. But it looked like whoever had designed the place hadn't planned on anyone bringing a battery-operated skill-saw. Which, lo and behold, Robbie kept in the trunk for setting up lighting rigs on the fly. He pried the weatherstripping off the doorjam with a flathead screwdriver, worked the skillsaw into the gap, and started sawing away at the deadbolt while Gabe stood watch behind him.</p><p>The saw bucked as the deadbolt yielded, and he almost broke the blade off. He shut it down and wiggled it out of the door, then pushed the door open, waving for Gabe to stay back.</p><p>The door creaked: hinges probably hadn't been oiled in a decade. Robbie peered around the space with his penlight, blinking in the darkness. He switched to his phone.</p><p>He'd half-expected a hoarder's stash of rocking-horses or toilet seats. Instead, he saw a <em>garage,</em> shelves along the walls, tools still dangling from peg-boards or strewn over the work surfaces as though waiting for their owner to return. A wide clear concrete floor, perfect for Alchemy diagrams. And far along one wall, the hulking canvas-wrapped figure of a vintage sedan.</p><p>Robbie flicked the light switch, and the lights turned on. Weird. "Looks safe," he said, and Gabe pushed his way in past him.</p><p>"Look at all the spiders!" Gabe exclaimed, and, yes, there was a rather horrifying density of spiderwebs stretching between the shelves and ceiling and clustered in little blurry stars along the edges of the poles. "Nobody's been here for years."</p><p>"I wonder why," Robbie replied. It hadn't been hard to break in. He was shocked the copper wires hadn't been stripped out, let alone the tools. He crossed the open floor toward the covered car, lifted one corner off, and about had a heart attack.</p><p>Dusty and covered in cocoons, the black painted hood of a late '60s Dodge revealed itself, an ostentatious chromed blower rearing up from a hole cut in the steel. "Holy shit," Robbie whispered, and gently peeled the rest of the cover away, reverently circling the massive muscle car.</p><p>Black Charger, black leather interior. He had a sudden flicker of memory: sitting on his dad's lap and covering his ears while the wind buffeted him and an engine whined and roared like a caged animal, his dad laughing at something the driver had said.</p><p>He spotted the keys hanging on the pegboard nearby. Opened the driver's door and sat down on the hard dry leather. Breathed: mouse urine, motor oil, gasoline, and a bright sharp herbal smell that he <em>knew,</em><span> he knew it so well, but he hadn't smelled it in so long.</span></p><p>"Wow," Gabe exclaimed from the passenger side. He was tugging at the handle. "Open up!"</p><p>Robbie ran his hands up and down the wheel. His face was wet and he didn't know why.</p><p>He realized what the smell was: aftershave. Dad's brand.</p><p>"I've been here," Robbie croaked, leaning across to let Gabe in. "Dad took me for a ride in this car. I remember."</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Oops</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Robbie and Gabe may not be genius Alchemists like Edward and Alphonse Elric, but they're still pretty talented and they have way more common sense. They're not raising the dead, just trying to satisfy Gabe's lifelong dream of finding out where the heck the rest of their family is.<br/>Things still go completely tits-up.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The earth roared, the sky pressed down like the lid of a pressure cooker, lightening wrapped around them strong and cold and leisurely as constricting snakes, and Gabe stared at Robbie across the ten foot diagram on the floor of the garage: first it was paint, then light, but now each line and curve they had painstakingly drawn was a black fissure into the earth, and with time and space churning and thickening between them, Robbie seemed to be drifting farther and farther away. Gabe kept his hands planted on the palm-rings—knife-sharp darkness inches from his fingertips—but he called out to Robbie. “You seeing this?”</p><p>Dimly, he saw Robbie worrying his lip-studs between his teeth. His hair stood on end from the wind and the static, the bleached forelock flickering. He looked across at Gabe suddenly, his green eyes huge in the darkness. “Gabe, I think I might—”</p><p>And whatever he was about to say, cut off into a yelp. The circles around Robbie's palms spun and sank into black holes, he was pressing his hands directly against the void, the alchemical diagram was energizing his body, and <em>this was never supposed to happen.</em> “Robbie!” Gabe yelled, but he couldn't move, if he broke contact with the diagram, the energy would tear Robbie apart and probably kill him, too; <em>never interrupt a transmutation in progress,</em> there were rules for this, if he stood up he'd make everything fifty times worse. He just had to complete the transmutation—<em>all they wanted was an address on a map, the circle had no reason to be carrying this much energy—</em></p><p>“I'm sorry,” Robbie said, and the void beneath his hands whipped around his body like black ribbons.</p><p>Gabe saw one eye staring at him, panicked, glossy, and then the black ribbons tightened and twisted and folded his body into a hole in space and dissolved his substance and Robbie wasn't there, <em>nothing</em> was there, just Gabe spinning in a void the color of the horrified grief in his heart, and the alchemical diagram blacker than black, sucking, hungry. “Robbie,” he said. “Robbie! Robbie!”</p><p>He felt something cold knifing its way around his own foot, numbing, tingling, like his leg was asleep, and he couldn't see anything but the diagram. “Robbie!”</p><p>Pain, all up and down his leg, like all his muscles being crushed at once. The lines flared white again, and suddenly he was back in the garage, the diagram was just paint and concrete, and maybe it was a hallucination, of course it was a hallucination, Robbie was still there, he just couldn't see him while the transmutation was active—</p><p>Gabe was alone in the garage. He shoved himself to his feet, <em>where's Robbie, where's Robbie—</em></p><p>His leg was gone. He fell in a pool of his own blood.</p><p>The circle had eaten Robbie. It had eaten his leg. Gabe knew what this was, he wasn't an idiot: alchemy had a price and it would take whatever was available to pay that price, but, faintly in the part of his mind that wasn't screaming, Gabe knew that it made no sense. There was <em>nothing</em> they'd done that should have demanded this: flesh, death. Not for information. Not for a fucking address.</p><p>The atlas in the middle of the circle smoked faintly, and Gabe was bleeding out and Robbie was—</p><p>“Give him back,” Gabe growled, drawing a new diagram in blood, the lines shaky, the circle lopsided, but good enough. He was not losing his big brother, not over an address, not from his own stupid mistake: this overpowered fucking diagram did not get to name its own price. It wasn't fair and it wasn't correct. He slammed his hands to the garage floor. “Give him back, give him back, give him back—”</p><p>This new circle blazed up quickly. It was smaller, simpler, its operator was more desperate. Light flashed, the sky fell, darkness surrounded him, and Gabe heard, no, felt a voice:</p><p>
  <em>Fair or not, you'll get nothing without sacrifice.</em>
</p><p>“Anything,” Gabe ground out.</p><p>Void ribbons rose up all around him and a small whisp of light rose up from the center of his new diagram. He felt it looking at him: it was afraid, it was sorry, it wanted to flee but couldn't bring itself to leave him. Gabe snatched it out of the air and cupped it gently between his two hands, and then he was back in the garage again: his other leg was gone and his vision was going dark, but he had Robbie's soul between his palms, and a soul needed a body.</p><p>The '69 Charger was just four feet behind him. Gabe put his elbows to the ground and crawled.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Drive</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Robbie has a bad time.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Drive.</em>
</p><p>That was the last thing Gabe had said to him before passing out from blood loss.</p><p>Robbie drove. He couldn't see his hands on the wheel or feel his feet on the pedals, but he felt the Charger swaying as he took the curves. He probably shouldn't be driving because he was currently in the middle of a panic-induced out-of-body psychedelic experience, but because of said psychedelic experience, he couldn't talk or fucking call 911 either, so he put the pedal to the metal and concentrated on making it to the hospital.</p><p>He was still seeing weird shit in fifty different directions at once, but when he concentrated on just looking forward, his vision was utterly clear, even though it felt like he was seeing from three feet off the ground. The car's blower and hood weren't even in his way, his brain was just—forget it and go, just go. The engine roared, shaking his heart. He accelerated up an onramp, the force crushing him backwards, got on the freeway, started weaving through traffic.</p><p>
  <em>Don't kill Gabe,</em>
  <span> he thought as he measured the distance available to pass. </span>
  <em>This thing has no airbags. Don't kill Gabe. Don't kill Gabe.</em>
  <span> A gap appeared and he swerved into it. </span>
  <em>Here I come, fucker.</em>
</p><p>
  <span>Blue lights flashed behind him and suddenly he was looking backward at a black-and-white with a flashing lightbar. </span>
  <em>Fuck'em.</em>
  <span> He poured on speed, heat spreading through his body and vibration shaking his bones. He left the SUV behind and spotted an exit for the hospital, took the curve so hard he started drifting, felt something burning him as the rear wheels skidded on the pavement. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He felt Gabe shifting around as he got control of the car. Gabe was on his lap, he realized, that's why he thought Gabe was in the driver's seat. Gabe </span>
  <em>was</em>
  <span> in the driver's seat. Robbie had him on his lap and was driving. That's why Robbie couldn't feel or see his own body, he was freaked out so bad because Gabe was passed out and bleeding on him. Normally Gabe wouldn't fit, except Gabe was a lot smaller now that their alchemy circle had </span>
  <em>cut off both his fucking legs—</em>
</p><p>He followed the signs, blew through red lights—it was perfectly safe, he could see <em>everything</em>, everywhere, all at the same time—took curves at the drift, even though it felt like burning, and ignored the siren of the new squad car following him. He led the cop to the emergency room and stopped. Tensed up.</p><p>He had to put the car in park. He had to carry Gabe out. He had to honk the horn. He couldn't figure out how to make himself do any of these things, so he just sat there, the rumble of the engine shaking his soul, willing himself to move and his brain to start working normally again as Gabe bled onto his lap.</p><p>The cop behind them got out and walked to the driver's side door, knocked on the window. Scared Robbie so bad he felt like the cop was tapping him on the shoulder through the glass. Peered in, spotted Gabe, face went white, started yelling, opened the door, hauled Gabe off his lap, carried him into the hospital. Left Robbie alone in the car with the door hanging open.</p><p>
  <em>Help,</em>
  <span> Robbie thought. </span>
  <em>Please, somebody help.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Somebody, please notice the catatonic guy covered in blood parked in front of the ER entrance. Please come pry my hands off the steering wheel or wherever they are, strap me to a gurney, and give me some Thorazine and electroshock until I can find my body again.</em>
</p><p>The cop returned, looking shaken, after an inestimably long time. He leaned inside the Charger's door. He didn't say anything about Robbie, didn't even look at him, though Robbie swore he felt him brush against him as he reached around the steering wheel and shut the engine off.</p><p>All Robbie's terror left him all at once. With the engine off, everything was still. He couldn't feel himself trembling. He couldn't feel himself breathing. Even though he felt suddenly calm, calmer than he'd ever been, calmer than when he used to take that horrible anxiety medication that made him robotic and stupid, his body didn't come back, and he still couldn't move.</p><p>
  <em>Somebody help,</em>
  <span> he thought. </span>
  <em>I have to get out of the car, I have to go find Gabe. I've gone crazy and I need help.</em>
</p><p>
  <em>Please, help, I'm hallucinating that I'm the car. I'm not breathing. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. Help me.</em>
</p><p>No one came to get him. Two hours later, a tow truck came and dragged him away.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Is this real life?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Robbie continues to have a bad time but his hallucination is getting more interesting.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I had to learn about automatic transmissions to write this. I am still confused</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The sun had risen and set twice over the impound yard since the disastrous transmutation at Tio's garage, or that was what appeared to happen. Robbie wasn't fooled: Robbie was really strapped to a bed on a drip somewhere getting his brain reset, or maybe he was dead and this was Hell.</p><p>He couldn't be dead.</p><p>He couldn't afford to be dead, he had to keep a roof over Gabe's head and put Gabe through college and <em>Gabe had his fucking legs cut off, what the fuck—</em></p><p>Gabe couldn't be dead, he just couldn't. And Robbie couldn't be dead, either, because Robbie had driven him to the hospital.</p><p>
  <em>I'm not dead, I'm not dead, I'm not dead, I'm not dead.</em>
</p><p>A bird crapped him. Probably some nurse, leaning over and dripping iced coffee or some kind of medication on his forehead by accident. Robbie wished he could wipe it off. He wished he could move.</p><p>What if he really was locked in an impound yard, though.</p><p>He could see everything.</p><p>
  <span>He saw the attendants in their stained white coveralls come and go from both behind and in front of him, heard the rumble and creak of tow trucks hauling new cars into the lot. Felt the cold spat-pat of pigeons shitting on him where they perched up above on the power line, the warmth of the sun on his back-neck-face-belly-whatever. And he'd driven to the hospital, somehow. He'd had to have been able to move something: the wheel, or the power steering pump, or the steering linkage itself. And the gas pedal, or the throttle. </span>
  <em>Go,</em>
  <span> Robbie thought, straining forward. </span>
  <em>Go. Drive. Move.</em>
</p><p>The attendant had left the transmission in park, but that wasn't what he was going for. What he wanted was...</p><p>Deep inside him, something moved. Like opening and closing his throat. Robbie didn't think it was the gas pedal; this felt very private, easy, and compact. A valve.</p><p>Okay, he could move the throttle. If he could feel anything but physical sensations, he'd probably be buzzing with joy. He wanted to bust out of here and find Gabe, and for that he needed to be able to drive. That meant operate the ignition, operate the transmission, steer, brake, and maybe use his turn signals if he wanted to be a law-abiding driverless car.</p><p>(What if he was dead in the driver's seat? No, nobody would have just left his corpse there, that was even stupider than thinking his mind was trapped in the car.)</p><p>He stopped trying to meditate his way back into his human body and studied the sensations of being the car. He felt something vibrating in the light breeze, like his hair ruffling: had to be the antenna. He felt warmth inside him like a hot drink, not private-inside like the throttle, just...interior. The (his) engine had been off for almost three days, so that had to be sunlight greenhousing in the cabin.</p><p>He concentrated on the warm inside parts. The driver's seat he knew, he knew too well, from Gabe's unconscious body sliding back and forth with the curves. The cabin was full of hollows and protrusions and metal accents; anything that felt cold and hot at the same time probably had a shadow, and anything extra warm all the way through was probably metal. His shifter lever was—he struggled to remember the feel of it in his hand—heavy plastic, possibly resin, insulating the steel rod running through it. But it was tall and narrow and because the plastic wasn't very conductive, it would feel hot on one side and cool on the other, and its location should feel central in his interior. Sinking deep into the sensations, he identified...something, and he concentrated very very hard on moving it. Not sure which direction, since he couldn't see it clearly from any of the many angles his vision offered, and anyway, he couldn't even be sure he was moving the right thing.</p><p>Something snapped open, deep inside him, and nearby, a larger, complex structure engaged.</p><p>
  <em>I'm in Reverse.</em>
  <span> This was good. This was excellent. He was a car, but he could operate the shifter. (The hallucination was getting far more interesting.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>P R N D L went the shifter, and he moved it again, into Neutral, the clutch rings inside him drifted apart, and </span>
  <em>he started moving—</em>
</p><p>
  <span>His wheels were turning. So slowly. He came alive to the textural sensation of gravel digging into rubber, he saw the view around him changing, he was drifting backward, </span>
  <em>he had altered his position in space</em>
  <span>, (maybe on the hospital bed he'd just turned his head to one side), he saw the cars on either side of him glide forward six inches, and then he came to an abrupt stop when he knocked against the steel hatch of a Ford Edge, a weird scratching on what must be his bumper.</span>
</p><p>That was neutral. Okay, he knew how to roll himself down hills now. He moved the shifter one notch further and felt his transmission engage again. He was in Drive. Back to Park, back to Drive again, feeling and hearing the shifter lever swing on its hinge and the stacks of clutch rings inside him meet, release, meet again.</p><p>Next was the ignition, and the easiest way to do that, rather than figure out how to basically pick the lock of his own ignition switch, was to directly move the ignition coil to close the circuit and start himself up. If only he could find it. The ignition switch lived on the steering column next to the ignition lock; the steering column was plastic-shrouded metal, the wheel was rubber-coated metal, the ignition switch itself was a little plug of metal. Anything metal ought to feel extra warm, and uniformly so. Maybe if he just felt out where the lock was, and then felt the wires and followed them inside himself...what would wires feel like? Like nerves? He couldn't normally feel a nerve unless it'd been hit, how was he supposed to—no, there had to be a way. He kept feeling, sensing, trying to move.</p><p>
  <span>The sun was low again when he finally managed to close his ignition circuit, and he felt and heard his starter motor cranking his engine, felt the drag of cold pistons deep inside himself, until sparks caught fuel and heat bloomed and his entire body shuddered as his engine roared to life. All the terror and bewilderment and triumph that he should have been feeling over the last sixty or so hours hit him like a brick to the face (through the windshield). He didn't want to shut down again, wanted to feel his body humming and pulsing and </span>
  <em>doing something, oh god I just want to feel alive like this</em>
  <span>, but he forced himself to turn off and waited another hour for another tow truck to appear at the gate to the lot. Watched a man in a stained white coverall climb down out of the cabin, unchain the gate, and dig his shoulder into it, rolling it aside thirty feet.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Robbie closed his ignition circuit until his starter motor cranked his engine again, and then </span>
  <em>yes</em>
  <span> then he was breathing, he was alive, he was terrified, he was elated, he was furious, he was going to get his brother. He put himself in Drive and his wheels started to move, and he opened his throttle to inhale and he lunged forward and spun gravel as he raced out of the lot and around the startled tow truck driver. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Back on the freeway, where he could really open his throat and the gears of his transmission churned and whirled in their fluid bath until he spun into third gear and raced over the pavement faster than he'd ever dared push a car from behind the wheel, seeing everywhere, feeling everything, wind in his blower and radiator, engine hot and thrumming, road rushing beneath his four tires, </span>
  <em>alive, alive, alive</em>
  <span>. Back to the hospital. Back to the ER parking lot, where he parked at the entrance and revved and revved, the sound of his heart roaring out over the whole city block because he hadn't figured out which bit of him was his horn.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>A cop came, opened his door to turn him off, and </span>
  <em>fuck no</em>
  <span> Robbie wasn't letting anyone do that again. He took off, the cop dragging over the asphalt and clinging to his wheel, but there were people in the way at the exit to the parking lot, and as he slowed, the cop climbed in, </span>
  <em>stomped</em>
  <span> on his brakes, pulled what had to be his emergency brake, and popped his hood. Robbie felt him digging at something sensitive and sparking as he sat in the driver's seat where Gabe had bled, </span>
  <em>no, not my wires, not my wires, no, no,</em>
  <span> but the cop's back-up jogged over to them, opened Robbie's hood (</span>
  <em>no, no, that's me, that's my insides</em>
  <span>) and unscrewed something very, very important.</span>
</p><p>Robbie's heart stopped. His engine died. He squeezed his ignition coil again and again, but while the starter motor cranked, startling the cops, his engine just wouldn't start. He realized Cop 2 had taken his distributor cap, and today's excursion was over.</p><p>He hadn't found Gabe—although now that he was physically unable to panic, he realized Gabe could never have made it down to the lobby to see him anyway. Gabe just had both his fucking legs cut off, Gabe probably didn't have a room with a window that could see him, if Gabe was even awake yet, if he'd even survived.</p><p>The cops called a tow truck.</p><p>At the impound lot this time, they jacked him up off the ground and put him on blocks.</p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Money doesn't grow on...oh, okay</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Gabe commits his first felony.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It had been two weeks since Gabe had turned his brother into a car.</p><p>They'd let him out of the hospital. CPS had placed him with an overbearingly friendly white couple and their four foster kids. Gabe had never been placed in a foster home without Robbie; they'd used to have a good-cop, bad-cop routine they did at every new house that ensured Gabe had lots of friends and everyone was too terrified of Robbie to mess with either of them. Now, alone, Gabe couldn't quite muster up his Good Cop. He hung out in the room he shared with a silent nine-year-old boy and they didn't talk at each-other.</p><p>The Joneses had driven Gabe back to his and Robbie's apartment to retrieve all the belongings he could carry, and when he'd opened the door to his own room, he'd realized he couldn't even make it halfway across the floor with all the clothes and miniatures and books scattered all over. So he'd slid himself painfully down off his wheelchair and scooted around on his butt, retrieved his laptop and phone charger and filled up a backpack with his favorite t-shirts. From Robbie's room, not sure what mattered to Robbie but desperate to save something, he grabbed a box of facial jewelry and a t-shirt Robbie had picked up roadie-ing for ANGR last year. Robbie didn't have a lot of stuff.</p><p>Everything that remained in the house would get trashed or auctioned off when the landlord kicked them out. Robbie couldn't pay the rent because Gabe had turned him into a car.</p><p>He made sure to pack up all his alchemy notes. Even though he had this feeling...maybe he didn't need them so much anymore.</p><p>The Joneses lived in a quiet suburb with green lawns and white new concrete sidewalks. They had an ornamental tree in their back yard, a Japanese maple, and Gabe wanted to touch it. So, though the stumps of his thighs slipped and skidded on his seat as he pushed, he shoved his chair inch by inch over the thick turf, over the roots where the tree thrust up the grass, all the way to the decorative rocks that guarded its trunk from the lawnmower. The red, soft, spidery leaves drooped low over the lawn, low enough for him to reach up and pluck a few free. He rustled them between his fingers, smelled them. Stared up at the hard blue sky that flashed through the tree's crown as it rustled with the breeze.</p><p>He turned around in his seat to riffle through the backpack that hung from his chair's handlebars, and found a five-dollar bill. Felt that, smelled it. Money was made of linen and ink: cellulose and various pigments. The red maple leaves were also made of cellulose and various pigments, along with water, which he didn't need. He picked a few more leaves, stared down at the fiver. Flipped it over, gazed at its opposite side.</p><p>In the middle of the Joneses' lawn, there was nowhere for him to get out the chalk and draw a circle to guide tectonic energy into an alchemical transmutation. He gritted his teeth. He wanted to try this. If he didn't do it right now, while he was ready, he'd probably just forget.</p><p>He'd turned Robbie into a car two weeks ago. A collectible, valuable car. Gabe may be wheelchair-bound right now, but of the two of them, Gabe was the one with hands. He couldn't fail Robbie. Wherever he was, he had to rescue his big brother.</p><p>He folded the leaves between his palms, his arms and chest making a circle, his body carrying his intent. He closed his eyes, felt heat in his hands, felt the earth shiver in the distance.</p><p>When he pulled his hands apart, he held a sopping-wet five dollar bill.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. How much you want for me to take that haunted car off your hands?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Grumpy has almost everything a man in his profession could want: money, respect, weapons, a loyal crew, a good supplier, choice sales territory...but he'd really love a great-looking muscle car that can hold its own in a drag race.<br/>Unfortunately, the 1969 Dodge Charger he wins at an auction keeps driving off on its own whenever his back is turned--at least it did, until he let it run out of gas, towed it home, and put it up on blocks. He doesn't mind making it someone else's problem as long as he gets his money back.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Come on,” Gabe insisted from the front seat of Ty's Corolla. “We're gonna be late, I don't think this is the kind of guy you cancel on. It took days to set up this meeting—”</p><p>“And you're paying him with your magic money,” Ty said, baffled. Gabe stared back at him, unrepentant, gripping the folded-up wheelchair that occupied the footwell. “Won't that piss him off, too?”</p><p>“I'm not sticking around for that part,” Gabe mumbled.</p><p>“Dude!”</p><p>“He won't notice unless he looks really close. It even fools those special pens. Anyway.”</p><p>“He's bad news. I don't think you're taking this seriously. What kind of a name's Grumpy?”</p><p>“I don't care. You can stay outside.”</p><p>“Like hell.”</p><p>They pulled up to the address, a pink-and-brick ranch house with a flashy '60s Cadillac DeVille and a 2010's Escalade parked in the driveway. Ranchera music blasted from inside, singing about Pablo Escobar's charitable works and the excellent pay and benefits he gave his soldiers. “No way are you going in there.”</p><p>“You gonna stop me?” Gabe demanded, flat stare and clenched fists. He shoved his door open and heaved his chair out. Ty got out and helped him lock it open so he could transfer in.</p><p>Gabe rolled up to the front steps and stopped, glared at them. Ty went on ahead and knocked softly on the door.</p><p>“Dude!”</p><p>He knocked harder, turned around, shrugged. Gabe wheeled himself to the post that held up the front eaves and banged on it with the side of his fist.</p><p>At last a big guy opened the door. Ty staggered back. He was muscular, tattooed, gold chain, gold wrist-watch. Had a gun tucked into his waistband, right front and center. Two other tattooed guys, smaller but just as mean, scowled from around his shoulders. “What'choo want?”</p><p>Ty, feeling low as a slug, pointed behind himself at Gabe.</p><p>“Good afternoon,” said Gabe cheerfully, from the sidewalk. “I'm Gabriel Cardona, we spoke on the phone. I'm here about the Charger.”</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Squirrel!</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Robbie and Gabe are re-united and fleeing Los Angeles. Robbie has no good way to communicate yet. Which becomes a problem when Robbie thinks he's run over a squirrel.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The Charger's engine droned on and on, vibrating the driver's seat as they left Los Angeles far behind. Gabe had never seen a road like this, twisting and curving with the hills, just rocks and trees in every direction. He stared out the windows, gasped as a tiny rodent ran across the road right in front of the car. Spun around and saw it disappearing into the scrub behind him.</p><p>The engine faltered and the car slowed.</p><p>“Robbie,” Gabe said. “What's going on? Are you okay?” He checked the gas gauge—still half-full. The Charger made a tremendous bang, backfire. “Are you hurt? Beep the horn once for yes, twice for no.”</p><p>The engine revved again and the car lurched; they were in the wrong gear, still slowing, and the engine and blower sounded sick somehow. The windshield wipers started up, squeaking against the dry glass. The radio turned on, nothing but static.</p><p>“Robbie!” Gabe's voice cracked. “What's wrong? Don't leave—” A horrible thought struck him, and he opened the driver's side door even as they were going down the road at thirty miles an hour. He looked down at the lip of metal around the door's rim, where a sticker sat that told him how much pressure belonged in Robbie's tires, and below that where a crude alchemical seal sat, drawn in blood and burned through the paint and into the steel below.</p><p>The brakes engaged and the Charger skidded to a halt. Gabe bashed his arm on the steering wheel and the seatbelt tried to strangle him. The radio static rushed and crackled.</p><p>“No, please,” Gabe sobbed. He patted the wheel, the door. “Robbie. What's happening, shit!” With the car stopped, he leaned down to examine the blood seal—had it been wiped off, or cracked—he'd bonded the blood to the car itself, he hadn't wanted it coming off in any way, but as a side effect he'd made rust. Had the rust spread? Was Robbie still here?</p><p>The static from the radio built and built, then suddenly cut off. Gabe felt his heart stop. “Robbie don't leave!”</p><p>The radio switched back on. More static, softer this time. Then, the knob wandered up and down its range, pausing on a country music station, passing back into static. A low tone interrupted the static, a sustained but wavering note. Like the sound effect for a flying saucer.</p><p>Gabe shut the door on the unmarred blood seal and pushed the seatbelt aside. “Robbie, please tell me that's you.”</p><p>The tone cut off, then on again briefly. Boowoop.</p><p>“One for yes?”</p><p>Boowoop.</p><p>Gabe hugged the steering wheel and pressed his head into it. “You sound like a droid,” he said, his voice hoarse. “What's wrong, what happened—” The radio went to static again. Gabe sat up and rubbed his eyes. “Are you okay to keep going?”</p><p>Boowoop. The engine sped up again, the supercharger whistling, and the Charger <em>vroomed</em> back into motion, zero to forty in about three seconds, sinking Gabe hard into the driver's seat. Robbie's seat.</p><p>“It's gonna be okay,” Gabe said, both to himself and to Robbie. “Once we get to Tio's place, we can take our time and figure this out. We got this.”</p><p>Boowoop, said the radio, and Robbie's engine droned on.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Sideways</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Gabe and Robbie drive East. They're both still adapting to their recent changes. It's been weeks since they've seen each-other and they've got a lot of catching up to do.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Written for fan-flashworks challenge, Sideways.<br/>Unfortunately, no native Spanish speakers have touched this chapter.<br/>This chapter deals with Gabe's amputations.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They barely made it to Flagstaff.</p><p>Robbie's engine overheated three times and he kept having to pull over to cool off, and then Gabe baked in the merciless heat radiating down from Robbie's black roof. The last time, Gabe was out of drinking water. He opened the driver's side door, checked the desert for oncoming traffic, and then braced one arm on the seat and the other on Robbie's door-frame and lowered his stumps to the pavement. He pulled himself immediately back in. The road, even in Robbie's shadow, was burning hot. Robbie made concerned whistling noises with the radio.</p><p>“I'm okay,” Gabe assured him, opening both windows and lowering the seat back.</p><p>Even with his engine shut off, something whirred and spun under Robbie's hood. He was probably trying to cool himself down so they could move again. Thank god Robbie was a mechanic. If Gabe's consciousness were trapped in a car, he wouldn't know the first thing about how to keep himself going.</p><p>Robbie <em>used</em> to be a mechanic.</p><p>Gabe was going to have to do everything for Robbie now, check his fluid levels and air his tires and, and <em>tune his valves</em><span> or whatever Robbie had been babbling on about while he'd been fixing up this stupid car, sweating and grinning and covered in grease. Gabe didn't know cars, except the older the car was, the more finicky and high-maintenance. Gabe wasn't responsible enough to take care of himself, let alone Robbie, let alone Robbie as a fifty-year-old suped-up muscle car. He dug his palms into his eyes.</span></p><p>At last, Robbie deemed it safe to start up again. The whole car shook as the engine turned over. Gabe pulled himself upright, shut the door, re-adjusted the seat back. “Okay, vamanos,” he said, patting the steering wheel, and Robbie moved off at fifty-five miles an hour.</p><p>The radio flicked back on. Robbie switched rapidly between Mexican and Country and talk radio, interrupting every couple seconds with a warbling, low-fidelity echo of whatever the speaker had just said. It seemed like it was hard for him to control pitch and shape tones and consonants. Gabe resigned himself to living in a Star Wars movie for the next few weeks, maybe come up with some kind of code system until he figured out how to get Robbie's body back.</p><p>When they got to Flagstaff, Gabe tried to direct Robbie to a gas station. Robbie ignored him, practically ripped the steering wheel out of his hands, and pulled up to the lobby of a Super 8 motel. “I'm not leaving you here alone,” Gabe protested.</p><p>
  <span>Robbie made a </span>
  <em>blaaat</em>
  <span> sound and wiggled the door handle, then shut off his engine. </span>
</p><p>Gabe dug the key out of his shorts and stared at it for a while, bare steel with a heavy pewter sugar-skull key-chain. Contemplated sticking it in Robbie and trying to start him back up. He put it back in his pocket, sighed, and heaved his wheelchair out of the passenger seat, banging it on Robbie's shifter and center console and steering wheel on its way out the driver's side door. He had to lower himself onto the ground so he could snap it open and do the safety latches. His arms shook as he pried himself backward up onto the seat. He was so tired, he probably wouldn't have made it if he'd still had legs.</p><p>He wheeled himself up to the lobby, bumped over the threshold of the automatic doors, paid for a ground-floor handicap access room with twelve of the twenty-dollar bills he'd transmuted out of an old pair of boxers and a pile of junk mail back at the foster home. Robbie followed him to the room, rumbling over the parking lot almost close enough to nose against the back of Gabe's chair, parked himself, and locked up the doors after Gabe grabbed his bag out of the passenger seat. Then Gabe wheeled himself painstakingly up the ramp. His bag almost slipped off his lap; his stumps weren't long enough to support it in place.</p><p>Once he got into the room, he realized he was hot and thirsty and stinking and he didn't have a change of clothes and he really really needed to pee. The fastest way to take care of all these problems was to roll off the chair and into the bathtub, where he banged the healing end of one stump when he landed and then sat there for almost an hour, clutching his thigh and staring at the drain and sobbing into the meat of his hand while cool water poured down on him. He washed his clothes in shampoo and hung them on the towel rack, and went to bed in a towel.</p><p>His stomach woke him up at dawn. He wheeled himself to the bathroom, wriggled into his damp clothes, brushed his teeth, hung his bag from the back of his chair, and left a twenty on the bed for the maid. The moment he left the motel room, Robbie popped open his driver's side door.</p><p>“Genial, I didn't know you could do that,” Gabe said.</p><p>Robbie's radio clicked and hummed, and then, slowly, he said, “Prac-tice.” The word ended in an exaggerated staticky hiss.</p><p>Gabe's eyes hurt and his breath caught. It didn't sound like Robbie's voice—aside from the hissing and wobbling, it was deeper, more resonant, which made sense because Robbie didn't spend his life talking into microphones, and people's voices always sounded different to themselves than to other people. Robbie must be trying to recreate the overtones he heard when he was speaking. But that smugly humble, one-word answer, that was Robbie all the way. “You need gas,” Gabe croaked. “And I'm hungry.”</p><p>An hour later, Gabe had McDonalds and Robbie had a full tank of premium, and Gabe was trying not to drop french fries on Robbie's floor while contemplating the best way to get his hands on some more cellulose fiber to make more money. He could save all his fast food packaging, but he still needed pigment. Green plants worked great. There were palm trees at the edge of the parking lot, but the leaves were too high to reach.</p><p>He dropped a french fry. “Fuck,” he said.</p><p>“Te nautuh,” Robbie said.</p><p>“Huh?”</p><p>The radio crackled and made a swooping noise. Then, “T. t. t-t-t-d-d-d-dddddd-d-th-th-th-d-d. De. Nada. Itsss bvine. Vvfffine.”</p><p>“I'm still sorry,” Gabe said. He set his food on the center console and bent down to throw the french fry out the window.</p><p>“<em>Ch-</em><span>How aw yyou.”</span></p><p>“I'm fine.”</p><p>The radio crackled dubiously.</p><p>
  <span>Gabe finished his Egg McMuffin and slurped the dregs of his coke. Robbie could barely talk because Gabe had turned him into a car. Now Robbie depended on Gabe for everything, and Gabe, just like always, couldn't stop himself from dropping food in Robbie's car, except the car was now Robbie's body, because Gabe had inadvertently performed human transmutation somehow and the best way he'd thought of to fix it was to weld Robbie's soul to the nearest inanimate object for safekeeping, except it wasn't really </span>
  <em>safe</em>
  <span> because Robbie could get wrecked or overheated or run out of gas or run out of oil or run his battery down, and what if they got separated and Robbie got trapped like he had when Grumpy stored him in his back yard up on cinderblocks because he kept running away and making the gangsters think he was haunted. Except he </span>
  <em>was</em>
  <span> haunted. The car. Robbie was basically a ghost, which meant Gabe had killed him. And then bound his soul to this world so he could never know rest—unless his binding sigil got damaged, which could happen at any time, probably from Gabe banging his wheelchair against it trying to shove it out through the door. </span>
</p><p>Gabe dropped another french fry, this one laden with ketchup, on the seat. “Fuck!” He ate it hurriedly and wiped the seat off with a napkin.</p><p>“<span>How far. T</span><em>ch</em><span>o Al. Bvu. Kkker. Kee, Albuquerque?”</span></p><p>Gabe checked his phone. “Three hundred and twenty-three miles.”</p><p>“Kas? Kkkk. Kchkk. Kas. Kas stay-shhhhhunn. How mmmanny kas-stay-shunzzz.”</p><p>“How many gas stations?”</p><p>Robbie beeped. Then, “Wwwai-t. D-raw dthththe kom-bvus-chen, combustion arrrray. Sso I can connntrolll my ffuel usage.”</p><p>Gabe blinked. Remembered Robbie's lighter, bought for the purpose, with the array scratched into the side, Robbie wandering around Tio's abandoned garage flicking the lighter and making fireballs for hours on end while Gabe chalked diagram after diagram onto the open floor. Remembered the last month before the accident, when Robbie had Sharpied the array onto the back of his hand every morning, Robbie taking him out for a ride in the Neon, and then, with a distant expression, pressing down on the gas while the little car took off like it was trying to launch into space. “Won't you hurt yourself?”</p><p>“<span>I knoooow what Im. Dthoo-ine. Do. Do-eeeem. Eeen. </span><em>Cr-sh-ch-k-crsh.</em><span>”</span></p><p>Right. Gabe had turned Robbie into a car, and now Gabe was patronizing him. Robbie used to be a mechanic and he'd been a goddamn prodigy with flame alchemy. As far as Gabe knew, he'd never damaged the Neon with it. Gabe shoved the rest of his fries into his mouth and wadded up his packaging. He needed a trash can—he needed to get the chair out of the car so he could wheel himself to a trash can—oh right, he was saving his wrappers to turn into counterfeit bills. What was he doing?</p><p>He needed a Sharpie, or some paint, or some white-out, or he could use some of the ketchup—wait, no, that wasn't durable. He needed a pen, to draw on Robbie, unless he was going to scratch the array into Robbie with the key. But what tool he needed, depended on where Robbie wanted the array drawn. “Where's your hands now?” Gabe asked.</p><p>Robbie took a long time to answer. “I dooonn have them.”</p><p>“<span>I mean, what </span><em>feels</em><span> like hands.” Gabe paused, his gut churned. “Do you feel anything?”</span></p><p>“I fee,” Robbie said hastily. “I feel fine.” So Robbie wasn't trapped in a hell of sensory deprivation. “Bvut nuh-theen feels llike hanzz.”</p><p>“<span>But you're </span><em>fine</em><span>,” Gabe said, fighting hysteria. Dios, Robbie didn't have any hands, of course he didn't have hands, cars didn't hold things, cars didn't manipulate their environment, they didn't repair or create or pull things apart to see how they worked, they just drove on pavement and drank gasoline. Every playable race in D&amp;D had hands. Gabe had polymorphed him into a car and now Robbie couldn't access any of his learned skills. </span></p><p>And Robbie was fine.</p><p>
  <span>He shouldn't be. There was no way Robbie was </span>
  <em>actually</em>
  <span> fine, he had a panic attack almost every month and he was always getting in fights and he needed something to </span>
  <em>do,</em>
  <span> to </span>
  <em>fix,</em>
  <span> to </span>
  <em>control</em>
  <span> constantly, and if he couldn't have that, he'd walk up to his foam rubber punchy-guy in the living room and go to town, and hopefully he'd remember to wrap his hands first.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Robbie had to synthesize his own voice now. Even if he wanted to express emotions—</span>
  <em>hah—</em>
  <span>he was a long way from figuring out how to. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>He'd watched Javier and Nita role-play this with Nita's stoic, damaged Tiefling ranger and Javier's human monk. He should open up first. “I'm okay, too,” he said. </span>
  <em>Open up, open up.</em>
  <span> “But. Um. It's hard.” He pointed at the chair, paused. “Can you, uh, see me? In here?”</span>
</p><p>“Yes,” Robbie said. “Itss vlurrrry—blurry. Exceb-t my mi-rrrrz.”</p><p>
  <span>Gabe looked up sharply at the rear-view mirror, half-expecting to see Robbie's tired green eyes staring back at him. Just his own. He looked almost as exhausted as Robbie used to, but without the piercings. Gabe hadn't slept enough, and that meant he couldn't think. They were fucked. He looked away, and his eyes caught on the chair in the passenger seat. Right. “It's still hard,” Gabe said. “With my legs gone. I have to plan out...</span>
  <em>everything.</em>
  <span> I can't reach shit.” He wasn't going to mention the pain, the phantom limb pain that came and went, or the agony when he banged his stumps wrong. “I'm getting better at using the chair, but. I can't just...go sideways. I have to, like, shimmy the wheels around. And sometimes there's no room. And sometimes I really have to pee. And it. I'm glad I'm alive, it could be worse.” He could be missing his arms. “It's just. Little things, esto y aquello.” He was starting to choke up, and he tried to stop it; this was supposed to be about Robbie. “It's hard. You know?”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Robbie's radio went to static and whistling, and then he started—</span>
  <em>humming,</em>
  <span> he was humming and it sounded like a midi file. Gabe thought it might be a lullaby, but the pitch kept wandering around, and the rhythm was off, and he abruptly realized that there was nothing wrong with Robbie's ears or his voice that had made him unable to carry a tune as a human—that was just Robbie. He genuinely, fundamentally sucked at music. It was...comforting, in a deeply irritating way, to hear Robbie completely fail at humming again. At last, Robbie said, “I'm sso sorry, K-ayb. I wish I. Could hel-p.”</span>
</p><p>“I'm handling it,” Gabe assured him. “How about you?”</p><p>“It's. Frus-t-ray-teen,” Robbie enunciated. “But. I'm a car now. I have to. Ket used to it. And, as long as you're o-kay, I can deal.”</p><p>This wasn't what Gabe was trying to get from Robbie, but he wanted, so badly, to believe it. He found himself nodding.</p><p>“I like to drive,” Robbie continued. “My body can k-k, can do a hun-d-red mmiles an hour. It feels. Amaz—awesome. I un-der-stan-d how the car operates, more. I don't ket tired any-more. There's. Doooown-sides, but. Thiss is me, now. I sh-ch-just have to ket use-d to it.”</p><p>“No, you don't,” Gabe protested. He grabbed the steering wheel, then patted it apologetically. He met his own eyes in the mirror. “This isn't forever, Robbie. I'm gonna get your body back, your real body. I told you. You were listening, right? Could you hear me the whole way over here?”</p><p>“Yes,” Robbie said. He hummed some more, tuneless warbling, filling the silence. “If an-y-one can do it, itss you. I trus-t you.” Then, “It was-nnn-t your fault.”</p><p>“You don't have to lie to make me feel better.”</p><p>Robbie's radio clicked, and the engine turned over once, startling Gabe. Click. Click-click-click-wheee. Then, “I check-ked, too. The array. You did it right.”</p><p>“If I did it right, then why did this happen?”</p><p>Robbie went silent. Nothing from the radio, nothing from the engine. It was as if Gabe were just sitting in a normal car in the McDonalds parking lot, talking to himself.</p><p>Maybe he was. “Robbie?” he asked, and his voice cracked.</p><p>“Hey,” Robbie said.</p><p>Gabe breathed. He was sweating suddenly.</p><p>“Can you. Carvve the com-bus-tion array. On the hub of my s-teer-een—steer-een—en mi vo-lan-te?”</p><p>“Carve,” Gabe said. “What, like with the key?”</p><p>“Sure.”</p><p>“Would that hurt you?”</p><p>“In-tén-ta-lo.”</p><p>Given that Robbie had done most of his own piercings himself, Gabe was not at all confident that Robbie would say anything if Gabe was hurting him. “I'll just, like, scratch it real light,” Gabe said, and dug through his backpack until he found the dog-eared, grease-stained sheet of printer paper with the proper array. He studied the custom boss in the center of the old-fashioned steering wheel, two inches of clear resin encasing a little skull that looked like it was carved in plastic or ivory. He marked out the corners of the array lightly with a sharp edge on the key, then carefully traced each arc and corner, working from the outer ring that called in the tectonic energy to the inner bends that directed it into reduction and oxidation reactions and then meeting in the middle with the inner ring that interfaced with the user's intent. He buffed the little curls of resin away with his sleeve. “How's that?” he asked.</p><p>Robbie started up his engine and Gabe took a sip of his coke. The ice had melted, and he sucked the meltwater up until the straw slurped again. The engine's idle made the whole car shudder and the driver's seat jiggle pleasantly. At last, Robbie beeped the radio, and then with a bang, fire erupted out the hole in the hood, engulfing the blower.</p><p>“Fuck!” Gabe yelled.</p><p>Robbie beeped and whistled and did it again. A woman leaving the drive-through window stopped suddenly across the parking lot and got out her cell phone, staring at the massive fireball.</p><p>“Robbie! What the fuck are you doing!”</p><p>More whistling. The fire vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving not a trace of soot on the gleaming blower. Robbie revved twice, then said “Sé lo que estoy hac-i-en-do,” which was not reassuring because he'd just lit himself on fire twice in two seconds.</p><p>“Pero yo no sé nada, te vas a joder tu mismo, what the fuck!”</p><p>Robbie revved and whistled and flicked the windshield wipers back and forth, shifted into Drive, and then took off with a lurch. The exhaust banged like a gunshot. At the exit of the parking lot, Robbie stopped suddenly. “Seat bvellll-t,” he said.</p><p>“Are. You. Okay,” Gabe demanded, not reaching for the seat belt.</p><p>“I'm okay,” Robbie said. “Thaaaaa—mu-chí-si-mas gra-cias. You're the bes-t.”</p><p>Gabe buckled up. “You're acting weirder than usual.”</p><p>“I'm. Happy,” Robbie said.</p><p>“You just lit yourself on fire.”</p><p>“I'm fine. Are you read-dy to go?”</p><p>Gabe clutched his face in his hands. “Yes. Wait. No. Bathroom, then we can go.”</p><p>Robbie reversed abruptly, T-turned, and stopped short outside the McDonalds entrance. He opened the driver's side door and unlatched Gabe's seatbelt.</p><p>Gabe heaved the chair out, managed to do the safety latches without lowering himself to the ground first this time. He transferred over, undid the brakes, and backed away. Robbie shut the door for him, but kept the engine running. “No fire. People are staring.”</p><p>Robbie flicked the windshield wipers and sat there, revving his engine. The whole car swayed every time he did it.</p><p>
  <em>It's fine,</em>
  <span> Gabe told himself as he rolled past the urinals to the handicap stall. </span>
  <em>Robbie likes fire. Robbie likes cars. You just gave Robbie back one of his skills, of course he's happy, and he's probably using the engine or the battery or something to make the sparks. He's not going to hurt himself.</em>
</p><p>He heard Robbie's exhaust pop again, through the cinderblock wall of the McDonalds. He maneuvered through the stall door, latched it, squeezed the chair into position, and got ready to lift himself onto the toilet. He ought to hurry.</p><p>
  <em>Robbie only just figured out how to talk last night,</em>
  <span> Gabe continued as he got to business. </span>
  <em>He's been trapped on blocks with his battery run down ever since Grumpy bought him at the auction. Of course he's going stir-crazy now that he can move again. He's adjusting.</em>
</p><p>Out in the parking lot, Robbie's engine roared like a grizzly bear.</p><p>
  <em>He's fine.</em>
</p><p>Gabe hurried.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. It's not haunted</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Robbie and Gabe get to Tio's house. Tio isn't there.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Yesterday afternoon they'd finally crossed the three hundred miles of desert between Flagstaff and Albuquerque, navigated through the city—a pretty quick couple of interchanges and then very light traffic—and pulled into the driveway of a Pueblo-styled two story house in the Los Ranchos suburb. It was a bit weird—there was an eight foot concrete wall all the way around, and wrought-iron spikes on top of that—but the paint was in perfect condition, and all the aloes and cacti along the side of the wall were plump and healthy. There was a For Sale sign hanging at the corner. Robbie rolled halfway up to the garage and parked diagonally, so Gabe had a shorter path to the home's side door. His huge, over-powered engine shook the whole car as he idled, </span>
  <em>whummumuma-whummumuma</em>
  <span>, and Gabe wondered if it was uncomfortable to have it turn so slowly.</span>
</p><p>“<span>It's not </span><em>that</em><span> far,” Gabe remarked, heaving on the chair that sat folded into the passenger footwell. “You saved me, what, three feet?”</span></p><p>“<span>Claro,” Robbie said. He still sounded bass-boosted when he talked with his speakers, but he'd worked through a lot of the awkward </span><em>mmmm</em><span>s and </span><em>llll</em><span>s of trying to figure out how to switch from one consonant to another. “What do you plan to tell him?” He still hadn't figured out how to do the </span><em>ng</em><span> sound, so he'd largely abandoned the gerund verb-form.</span></p><p>“Well, since you're here, it'll be pretty obvious we broke into his garage,” Gabe said. “I guess I'll have to apologize for that. And I'll have to introduce myself. And to break the news about you, I should probably start by showing him the blood seal and talk about how I was researching it as kind of a necromantic spell for my alchemy RPG system.”</p><p>“I meant about why this happened,” Robbie interrupted. “To us. What we did.”</p><p>Gabe raised an eyebrow at himself in Robbie's rear-view mirror. “I'll draw him the array. I'll, like, scoot around on the floor.”</p><p>“That's not what I meant.” Robbie crackled his speakers, a static sigh. “It doesn't make any sense. He'll think we're hid—we've lied.”</p><p>“Tough shit,” Gabe said. “We're not hiding or lying about anything. I probably scribed something backwards because that's exactly the kind of thing I'd do. If I knew this was possible, I never would have asked you, Robbie, never, you believe me, right? I thought it was safe—I need help. I don't know what I did.”</p><p>“Of course II bvelieve you,” Robbie said. It came out buzzy, mechanical. Probably because he wasn't thinking as hard about what he sounded like. “I jjust meant. What if we told him we did someth—algo mas peligroso. Like. Tried to change a person.”</p><p>“But we didn't.”</p><p>“But this happened.”</p><p>“Yeah, and it makes no sense,” Gabe said. “I mean, I know why I'm down my second leg, and I'll stand by that decision, but you, and Leg #1, complete mystery. I'm not lying to Tio just so things make sense. I'm hoping for some actual help, here.”</p><p>“Okay,” Robbie said. He shut his engine off and the car stopped shaking. Robbie stopped shaking.</p><p>Gabe heaved the chair up and got the wheels resting on the leather of the passenger seat, the handles banging into the lining of the roof. Robbie lowered the passenger seat back so he could tip the chair back and grab it by the wheels. Gabe pulled it toward himself across Robbie's center console, banged it against Robbie's steering wheel, rolled it over the driver's seat in the void where his legs ended, and tipped it out the driver's side door onto the concrete, catching it by one handle before it flopped over. “There's got to be a better way to do this,” Gabe remarked.</p><p>“You could put a pulley in the roof,” Robbie said.</p><p>“Wow. In a 'previously restored vintage Mopar?' How much did it hurt you to say that?”</p><p>Static.</p><p>Gabe leaned out while Robbie braced him against the seat with the shoulder belt, wiggled the chair open, and locked it. Now the chair was facing away from him, and he had to spin it around to transfer in. He started heaving it around. The small front casters caught in the gravel, and the rear wheels were set too far back for the chair to turn easily. Gabe had to lean out of the car to move it, while Robbie braced him with the shoulder belt. There had to be a way to make the chair suck less. He glared at the wheel hubs, wondered how it would feel if he alchemized them an inch or two further forward.</p><p>He could ruin the chair. Maybe lose an arm.</p><p>He'd just gotten it spun to face him, and had unlatched the seat belt to transfer in, when a harried-looking white woman in a bathrobe burst out of the house. “Out! Unless you're a real estate agent, you have no right to be here! There's no ghosts! This house is <em>not</em> haunted!”</p><p>Gabe froze. He really hated when people were angry with him. “I'm not,” he started, and his voice caught. He started to fold the chair back up, pull it back in.</p><p>He heard a whirring noise from under Robbie's hood, felt the car shudder as the engine turned over. Robbie was thinking about starting his motor. “Don't,” he whispered, and the noise stopped, but Gabe felt better. This was what he'd been missing while he'd been recovering at the foster house: Robbie looming over his shoulder with his heavy eyebrows and crazy green eyes, the tilt of his head asking, <em>Are you sure you want to speak sternly to my little brother? Are you really, really sure?</em></p><p>“I'm not a tourist,” he called to the woman as she stomped out into the driveway. “I'm family. Gabe Reyes—Alberto Reyes' son.”</p><p>“No Reyes here,” the woman said. “Go on. Private property, get out.” She rounded the car and finally caught sight of the chair, and the stumps of Gabe's legs. “Oh my God! I'm so sorry, I didn't know.”</p><p>At least now Gabe had pity on his side, though he resented the implication that just because he'd lost his legs, he couldn't drive to see the local haunted house on a lark. “I'm actually looking for Eliot Miller,” he said. “He's my uncle.”</p><p>“No Millers here, either.” The woman reached for the chair, and Gabe gripped it defensively. “I mean it, you need to go. The more people come, the worse the rumors get, and I've got to get out of this house.”</p><p>A dead end. Seven hundred miles and two days and no one to help them. They might as well have stayed in LA. “Maybe he goes by Elias?” Gabe pressed. “His real name's Elias Reyes.”</p><p>“No.” She sighed. “Sorry. No. Nobody by that name. Lots of people move in and out of this house. Maybe you could ask a real-estate office or something. When he used to live here?”</p><p>“I know he owned this place in the Nineties,” Gabe said. “Ninety-seven.”</p><p>The woman clutched her hands over her mouth as though to stifle a scream. “Ohmigod. Did he <em>do</em> that to you?”</p><p>She was staring at his legs. “What?” Gabe looked down at his stumps. “No.” He'd been waiting for an opportunity to try out an entertainingly gruesome <em>how I lost my legs and totally didn't commit an Alchemy taboo</em> story, but he didn't think <em>bear attack</em> would lighten the mood here. “Uh...diabetes.”</p><p>“Oh God,” she said. “Thank God. Kid, if you're after whoever lived in this house back then, thank God you didn't find him. God is watching out for you. If you know what's good for you, stop looking.”</p><p>“Okay,” Gabe said, and collapsed the chair to begin the awkward and shoulder-straining process of hauling it back inside.</p><p>At last he was able to shut Robbie's door, and Robbie started back up and backed away out of the driveway. The woman watched them until they reached the road, then cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, “It's <em>not</em> haunted!”</p>
<hr/><p>Yesterday, they'd driven to Tio's house in the hope of, somehow, figuring out how to transmute Robbie a new human body without actually performing human transmutation. Today, they had no idea where Tio was, Robbie was still a car, and this was his first day in an underground parking garage. Fluorescent panels flickered against the acoustic texture of the concrete ceiling, the dull concrete floor, the nubbly concrete wall behind his rear bumper, and the Chevy Bolt and Nissan Armada parked on either side of him. Ahead and about fifty yards to his left were the elevator doors, and these were where Robbie focused his attention as he waited for Gabe to get back from the Bernallilo County Clerk's Office.</p><p>
  <span>He heard the hum of another car's engine reverberate through his body panels, and a minute later the car itself rolled by. Robbie scanned its curves as it passed from his blurry and distorted side vision to his superb but narrow forward vision. It was a Buick Riviera. Robbie watched its driver's eyes pausing on him, and for an instant he thought she was seeing </span>
  <em>him,</em>
  <span> but no, of course not, she was looking at his blower, at the suped-up antique parked in among all the commuter cars. The Buick disappeared around the corner of the garage, rolling deeper in, and the sound of its engine faded. The garage was quiet and still. Robbie's body was quiet and still. The fluorescent lights flickered overhead.</span>
</p><p>The parking garage had been Robbie's idea. Though claustrophobic, it was the closest parking to the Clerk's Office where Gabe was trying to track down where Tio had moved, and more importantly it was covered. Two days ago, on the trip from Los Angeles to Flagstaff, Robbie had watched Gabe sweating and nursing his water bottles and rolling the Charger's windows up and down, and then getting sleepier and sleepier, his face red, his body cool against the Charger's hot leather—because the Charger's cabin was a black-roofed greenhouse getting hotter and hotter and Gabe was suffering heat exhaustion and there was nothing Robbie could do to stop it. Robbie was not going to let himself become a hot car that Gabe had to sit in when there was perfectly good covered parking available. So he'd made a fuss about UV rays damaging the paint, and Gabe had indulged him, and now here he was, three stories underground, waiting in the car for Gabe to get back.</p><p>
  <em>Waiting in the car.</em>
</p><p>Before Gabe had found him, while his battery was dead and he'd been resting on cinderblocks, he'd still let himself believe he was a human being trapped in the Charger. The drug dealer who'd bought him at the impound auction had thought—known—it was haunted: after Robbie had run off to look for Gabe for the third time, he hadn't tried to drive the Charger, or touch it, or maintain its engine, or do much of anything with it besides sling a tarp over its hood before it rained. People came and went, and the sun rose and set and rose and set, and Robbie observed it passively, feeling warmth when the sun hit the Charger's roof, or a flutter when its antenna vibrated in the breeze, or a cool spatter whenever the dealer's dog urinated on the sun-warmed rubber of his right front tire; he could wiggle the mirrors and look around a little, and that was the extent of his useful physical abilities. It was easy to distance himself from a body that no-one interacted with and which he could barely move. Easy to let himself believe that all these blended-together weeks were just one long panic attack from not knowing where Gabe was. Surely, if he could just find Gabe, his anxiety would ease and the hallucination would release him back to reality, and he could step out of the car or sit up from his hospital bed and be normal. He could hug Gabe and Gabe could shove him away and then they could go splurge on ice cream.</p><p>But Gabe was back, they were together, and the sun rose and set and rose and set and Robbie was still trapped in the car.</p><p>Except he wasn't trapped.</p><p>Robbie could move now. He had a good battery and half a tank of gas. He could start himself up any time he wanted and wander around the parking garage. He could talk to Gabe through the sound system. After two days of driving, and feeling Gabe shifting around in his seat and the chair rubbing against his interior and his wheels rolling over the pavement and his suspension flexing with the road, he now had a fair idea of what most parts of the Charger felt like and how to move them if he wanted to.</p><p>He cranked his front wheels back and forth to feel the rubber scrape on the concrete.</p><p>If Robbie could believe the evidence of his senses, then Gabe was back, and Gabe was, if not okay, at least healthy. But those same senses were telling him that the past however-many weeks he'd spent up on blocks were just as real as when he'd watched Gabe disappear through the elevator doors however-many minutes ago. The reason that Robbie couldn't follow Gabe into the elevator and up into the Clerk's Office was not that he was catatonic and stuck in the driver's seat, but because he was six feet wide and seventeen feet long and weighed almost two tons. This was him. This was his body.</p><p>Robbie knew that becoming a car was a much lighter punishment, a perversely lighter punishment, than having both legs cut off. Gabe was still in pain. He'd always been active, zooming and bouncing around, and last fall he'd made the varsity soccer team, but now even crossing a street required mechanical assistance and careful planning. Meanwhile, Robbie could do everything a car was meant to do, just as well as any other car, and usually much faster. He didn't get tired or hungry. He didn't have to worry about getting hurt at work or saving up to finish his associate's degree anymore. He couldn't feel worried at all, while his engine was off. Couldn't feel bored, either. Which was a good thing, because unless Gabe found some miracle loophole, Robbie would be spending most of his existence, however long or short that might be, in parking lots and garages like this one.</p><p>Well, hopefully not quite like this one. He needed to see the position of the sun in the sky; time was slippery now that he was a car. When he let his mind drift, a day could feel like an hour; when he concentrated, he could feel the individual valves of his engine open and close as he roared along the freeway, milliseconds stretching.</p><p>A man in a twill shirt and slacks, sport coat draped over one arm and briefcase in his hand, trudged through the garage. When he noticed Robbie, he stopped, brightened, stared. He rested his hands on his hips and stood in front of each of Robbie's headlights, his head rising beyond the cone of Robbie's perfect forward vision and into the warped view that he was probably getting from his windshield. When he'd finished staring, he whistled to himself, pushed the door button on the Chevy Bolt to Robbie's left, swung inside, and backed out of the parking space, leaving an open spot. The car across the open space was in Robbie's side vision, and since neither of them were in motion, it took some puzzling to work out what he was seeing. It was some kind of sedan, and it was blue, or maybe gray. A yellow truck rolled past a while later and parked next to him. Robbie didn't get a good look at the truck. He could feel the heat radiating from its engine as it cooled. He watched its driver and passenger stride toward the elevator doors, two men in suits, arguing; he could barely hear anything they were saying. Human voices didn't resonate well with the Charger's external parts.</p><p>Well, he could do something about that now, couldn't he. He concentrated on rolling down the windows, trying to remember how it felt when Gabe did it. He got one handle to jiggle, and then inch by inch it turned; he felt the gears engaging inside his door, and then the smooth drag of his glass against the rubber waterstripping. It was very slow. He still couldn't hear anything, but the men maybe weren't talking very loud. He'd rolled it half-way down when he realized he was vulnerable with his window open, someone could reach their arm inside him and unlock him and sit in him or try to steal Gabe's things. He rolled the window back up.</p><p>How long had Gabe been gone?</p><p>Robbie fidgeted with his radio dial, listening for a human voice or a snatch of music coming over the air to tremble, too soft for human hearing, in his speaker cones. If he caught a radio station or a news station, sooner or later they'd mention what time it was. But nothing penetrated the layers of concrete above him. All he heard was fuzz.</p><p>Well, he just had to wait. Sooner or later, Gabe would come back. There was no telling how long research would take him; he tended to go on reading binges when he was anxious or interested in something, and Gabe was anxious about Robbie and interested in finding a surviving family member. Robbie hoped Gabe would remember to eat. There had to be vending machines up in the Clerk's Office. He hoped Gabe's funny money would work in them.</p><p>Robbie heard a car rumbling from around the corner on his floor of the garage, the sound resonating in his tires. As it passed in front of him, he examined its details—a Ford Fusion, the driver a woman in a suit jacket, with layered, highlighted hair and glasses. It cruised around the other corner and disappeared. A Camry followed it. An Acura after that—stock pipes, Robbie noted. All these cars were stock. Not an ounce of automotive passion from any of these drivers. An F-150, a Suburban, a completely stock Subaru WRX. The Nissan Armada parked at Robbie's right drove away. Were all these cars leaving, or coming in? The Armada was leaving, but what about the rest? Robbie couldn't see which ramp they were taking as they rounded the bend, the up-ramp or the down-ramp. They had to be leaving. It had to be evening, and people were going home.</p><p>A Honda Fit backed into the space where the Armada had been, and a young woman bounced out of it, jogged to the elevator and jabbed the button impatiently.</p><p>It had to be evening. Gabe would come back any minute now. Gabe was fine, he'd been on his own for weeks before he'd found Robbie. He was in a public building, in a really nice clean city. He might as well be at the library. He didn't need Robbie with him all the time.</p><p>He was an unaccompanied minor with no driver's license, just his social security card and birth certificate in an ancient ziplock bag, and hopefully his student ID from Lincoln High. Did Gabe have them on him, or had he left them in Robbie? Robbie hoped he'd grabbed them before he'd come rescue him and they'd left on this road-trip—Gabe knew how important his paperwork was, it had to be in the backpack somewhere, he knew forgetting his papers was way worse than forgetting his toothbrush. He had them. Surely, he had them. But he might not have them <em>on his body.</em></p><p>Gabe knew this stuff. Gabe was fine.</p><p>Robbie knew his separation anxiety was a problem, but this was ridiculous. He didn't have a heartbeat, he didn't have adrenaline, he didn't have teeth to grind or fists to clench or any of the physical reactions that made anxiety unbearable. If he let himself drift a little, time would pass and Gabe would come back. There was no sense analyzing each second and filling the whole afternoon with thoughts. That was ruminating, and ruminating was bad.</p><p>Stop thinking, he told himself. Stop thinking. Stop—</p><p>He stopped thinking for an indeterminate period.</p><p>Something passed across his forward vision. It was the driver of the Honda Fit. She was back already, finished with her errand. He wondered why she was in such a hurry. Was it almost closing time? Past? In the time she'd been gone, since Robbie had stopped himself from paying attention to his surroundings, the parking garage had emptied even further. He was in a desirable parking space, right across from the elevator, but three floors underground. It was unlikely that another car would park next to him for a while.</p><p>Maybe, since she was in such a hurry, she wouldn't look around to see where Robbie's voice was coming from. He rolled his right window down, faster than when he'd first tried it, but still too slow. He only had it halfway down when she reached her car, and Robbie turned on his radio and asked, “E-escuse me, what time iz it?”</p><p>Shit. He was rushing himself and he sounded like a robot out of an old movie. Robbie crackled in frustration, cut himself off as the woman turned around suddenly.</p><p>He couldn't see her face with his side window rolled so far down, but in his mirror, he could see her torso, and she was peering right into his empty passenger seat. “Weird,” she said, and turned back to her Fit.</p><p>Robbie tried to settle himself mentally, wishing he could do some controlled breathing. That usually used to help. Opening and closing his throttle didn't do that much for him, especially with his engine off and no air flowing through it, but it was a decent way to fidget. “Could you tell me what time it is, please?” he asked, more carefully. That came out much more realistic.</p><p>“Shit,” the woman said softly, and she glanced back and forth through the parking garage, got into her car, and started it up. Robbie wished he could see her face. Even if he turned his right mirror as far over as it could move, he could only see the rear quarter panel of her car. She was leaving. Did she see someone following her?</p><p>No, she was scared of the disembodied voice asking her what time it was. Women were always a little paranoid. Not that Robbie could blame them, but he wasn't trying to kidnap her to sell her into sex slavery, he just wanted the time. He wished he knew how to honk his horn. Instead he started himself up and revved his engine, and <em>oh fuck—</em></p><p>Where was Gabe</p><p>Where's Gabe, Gabe's in the government building, where is he</p><p>Is Gabe coming back</p><p>Did someone find him</p><p>Did someone take him</p><p>How long has it been?</p><p>Gabe was gone. Gone, gone, gone, and Robbie had been sitting in a parking garage when he should have been looking for him, and who knew how long it had been, it could have been <em>days—</em></p><p>
  <em>Shouldn't have started the engine,</em>
  <span> he thought distantly, his whole body shaking and humming, but his more pressing concern was that the only human being who could tell him how long Gabe had been gone was in the car next to him and was about to leave the garage. </span>
</p><p>He put himself in Drive, turned, and shot out in front of the Fit, trapping it in its parking space. “Pllllz—II. Just need to know what time it is,” he demanded, speakers straining.</p><p>The Fit honked the horn, a long high-pitched blast. Show-off. Robbie revved again, making his frame rock on his shocks. The block was still cold, the pistons dragged, and it almost hurt, but he had to move, he had to do something. “Time. What time?”</p><p>The Fit backed deeper into its parking space as though about to ram him. Robbie opened his door so hopefully the driver could hear him better. “What time is it?”</p><p>The driver rolled down her window a crack, and Robbie strained to hear her through the hum of his engine. “Fuck you, I'm not getting in.”</p><p>Robbie crackled, a wash of static drowning out his own thoughts. Stupid. He was going crazy, he knew better than this. “I don't want you,” he said, as loud as he could manage. “I want the time.”</p><p>“Is this a prank?” the woman demanded, her voice cracking. “Because it's not funny.”</p><p>“YYYes.” Robbie clutched at the explanation. “Please tell me what time it is, I'm sorrry.”</p><p>“Check your computer, you fucking incel.” The Fit's engine revved. Robbie realized she really was threatening to ram him.</p><p>“Donnn do that, your in-sur-ance will count it agains' you,” Robbie enunciated as fast as he could, “and your front fascia cosss fif-teen 'undred dollllars.”</p><p>“Go outside.”</p><p>
  <em>I want to, I want to so bad.</em>
  <span> “Please. Please, please, please, please, please I just need the time, please, please—”</span>
</p><p>“It's six forty-seven, you fuck, now let me go—”</p><p>Robbie shut his door and backed out of the way, ashamed. The driver of the Fit peeled out of the parking space, leaving two little patches of burnt rubber from the front tires.</p><p>AM or PM?</p><p>He hadn't remembered to ask.</p><p>And what day?</p><p>Didn't make a difference, since he hadn't known the date to begin with.</p><p>
  <em>What's wrong with me,</em>
  <span> he wondered. And then, </span>
  <em>Where's Gabe?</em>
</p>
<hr/><p>Gabe slumped over his lap, exhausted, waiting for the elevator to descend. The librarians, or whatever you called the people who ran the Clerk's Office, had kicked him out after what felt like just a few hours of hunting down Tio's property records.</p><p>Eliot Miller had owned the house in Los Ranchos, but when he'd sold it, the money had gone to a different person, some guy named Elijah Royal with a post-office box address in Idaho. Elijah Royal was a paper-thin alias for Elias Reyes, so Gabe had asked one of the librarians to help him look Mr. Royal up. Elijah Royal owned a heavy-equipment supply company, where you could rent things like backhoes and earth-movers and wood-chippers. The website was still up, an Internet relic of amateur HTML, a bright red background with black text, not the most readable, and one of those hit-counter things at the bottom. The site hadn't been updated for eight years. Gabe tried calling the phone number on his cell, but it wasn't in service.</p><p>With further assistance from the librarians, Gabe found Tio's Idaho house, a double-wide on five wooded acres in the foothills. According to Zillow, it had been sold twice in the last five years.</p><p>If Tio was switching identities every time he sold his houses, as one might expect of an unregistered alchemist who didn't want to sell out to the military-industrial complex, it looked like the only way to find out where he'd gone was to check Idaho's home sales records, which weren't available online unless you were, like, FBI.</p><p>So after seven—really, seven?—hours of research, Gabe had no better plan for how to track Tio down than <em>have Robbie drive to Boise.</em> At least it would keep the police off their tail, which was important, since Gabe's fake ID wasn't all that convincing. He barely had to shave yet. And he was starving. And he'd managed to beg two giant handfuls of paper shreddings off the librarians, to take home for a “science experiment,” or transmute into more cash, or whatever. So the day hadn't been completely wasted.</p><p>Heck, if they actually went to Boise, maybe they could talk to people who knew Tio. That trail was less than ten years cold. They might even be able to get him on the phone. Gabe had his old home address, and the address for his equipment rental company—he couldn't have been the only employee, right? So somebody must have known him. Even if he was on the run, he had to have friends, and Gabe, though he could almost pass for eighteen in dim light, really, really didn't look like a Federal agent. Maybe someone would talk to him. And Robbie would be able to get more practice talking on the drive North. They could do it in two days, three if they took their time.</p><p>The elevator doors opened and the other passengers filed out on their tree-trunk legs. Gabe checked that his backpack was still hanging from his chair handles and laboriously pushed himself out. The chair creaked and flopped with each push. The sling-seat, despite being just a simple sheet of vinyl, managed to dig into his hip-bones. He needed to get back to the motel—no, a new motel, since they'd checked out of the old one already. He needed to get back to Robbie.</p><p>He emerged on the second floor, which was the wrong floor. Mierda. Now he had to get back in the elevator, but it was already going down. He pushed the down button and waited, chewing on a blister on his palm.</p><p>The next down elevator took him to the glossy tile lobby of the Clerk's Office, and he rolled easily to the exterior door, almost got the chair's front casters caught in the funky carpet-and-aluminum grate in the front that served to catch dirt on people's shoes, over the threshold bump, and out into the baking desert heat. The sun had shifted to strike full-force against the building, which reflected the light right back at him from the mirrored windows. Gabe was getting it from both sides. He pushed himself along the sidewalk, wary of the wheelchair ramps carved into the curb that his chair wanted to roll down at full speed whether there were cars coming or not. He was just reaching out to punch the crosswalk button when a big black car screeched across two lanes of traffic toward him, spun around in the middle of the road, and skidded to a stop inches from the sidewalk. It was Robbie, windows down, revving over and over again. “Santos, I almost peed myself,” Gabe exclaimed, shoving himself toward the driver's side door. He noticed that Robbie was pointed the wrong way into traffic.</p><p>Robbie opened the door for him, and Gabe shimmied his chair into position, locked the wheels, and hauled himself inside, bracing himself by Robbie's roof. He had to collapse the chair to get it in the car, and he had to get his backpack off it before he collapsed it, and he had to turn it around to grab his backpack, and he had to unlock the wheels to turn it around.</p><p>“What're you doing out here?” Gabe asked, unlocking the wheels. “I was headed down to the garage.” <em>What if we'd missed each-other, </em>he thought. “How'd you get past the gate?”</p><p>“Tailgated a Sorento on its way out,” Robbie said. “I.” And then he went silent.</p><p>Gabe stared at Robbie's radio, waiting for him to continue, then he turned back to his chair, which was still facing the wrong direction. He turned it around and retrieved his backpack, set it neatly on the passenger seat. Folded the chair and dragged it past Robbie's steering wheel and into the cabin. “Are you okay?”</p><p>“Yes,” Robbie said. He sounded calm. He'd just slammed on his brakes in the middle of the road, burned out, skidded around, and almost hit the curb trying to get to Gabe. Gabe shut the door and raised his eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “Gabe. Could you mmaybe buy me a watch. So I know what time it is?”</p><p>Gabe sucked air through his teeth. “It was dark down there, wasn't it.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p><em>Dark</em> wasn't quite what Gabe had meant to say. “Can't you use your clock radio?”</p><p>“No,” Robbie said again, and his speakers fuzzed.</p><p>Gabe squinted at the radio in Robbie's dash. It was newer than the rest of the car, but still pretty old, and more importantly, it was impossible for Robbie to “see” it, however that worked, with his mirrors. “I'm getting you a phone,” Gabe decided. “So you can use Siri. I'll set it up for you, all voice commands.”</p><p>“No. Kabe, jus a watzzch,” Robbie protested.</p><p>“We're going to Best Buy.”</p><p>“Did you find Tio?”</p><p>“I found where Tio <em>was,</em>” Gabe grumbled. “He got another fake name in Idaho, but I can't tell where he went after that. I think we've got to go there and ask around.”</p><p>Robbie idled for a minute, digesting this, or just thinking car thoughts. “Might as well,” he said at last. “Hopeful-ly he didn't move too far this time.”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>Robbie backed down the sidewalk a bit, getting a better view of oncoming traffic, Gabe figured, and as a gap between the cars appeared, he revved his engine, tightened Gabe's shoulder belt, and peeled off with a screech.</p><p>“Wow,” Gabe laughed, patting the steering wheel. “That fun?”</p><p>Rising and falling static from the speakers. “It's intense,” Robbie said at last. “Tienes hambre?”</p><p>“Starving.”</p><p>“<span>I passed a Wendy's on the way this mornin.” </span></p><p>“Ugh.”</p><p>“It's that or Subway.”</p><p>Wendy's had a drive-thru. Gabe didn't feel like hauling his chair out of the car again until after he'd eaten. “Wendy's is fine.”</p><p>They drifted through traffic, slowed smoothly to a stop at a yellow light. Robbie's idle went choppy again, thrumming through the whole car. It was the cams, Gabe remembered from those weeks they'd spent in the garage before the accident; he'd taken a break from chalking up the concrete floor to lean over Robbie's shoulder as he took the Charger apart and cleaned the parts and put them back together, surrounded by ancient car manuals he'd checked out from the library. The Charger's camshafts determined how long the intake and exhaust valves stayed open, and the stock camshafts had been switched to a moderately aggressive after-market style which gave it better airflow at high speeds but made the idle rough even when nothing was wrong with the engine. It was almost pleasant, once you got used to it. Like a heartbeat that rattled your eyeballs.</p><p>“Can you do me a favor and honk my horn?” Robbie asked as the light turned green.</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“I can't figure out how if I don't know what it feels like.”</p><p>Gabe grimaced. It made sense. “Now?”</p><p>They had a decent gap between themselves and the car in front of them. “Might as well. It should be the badge en el centro del volante.”</p><p>Gabe peered at the custom resin boss in the center of Robbie's steering wheel, with the little scrimshaw skull embedded in it and the combustion array that he'd scratched into the surface yesterday. He pushed down firmly.</p><p>Robbie screamed.</p><p>It was hoarse and raw and sounded like a man getting shoved feet-first into a woodchipper. Gabe yanked his hand back and the cry faded slowly. He noticed the driver beside them staring at them. “Shit! You okay?”</p><p>
  <span>Robbie whistled and chirped with the radio, then, “When we find Tio, voy a hablar con el de all this goth shit in-sta-ló en this car. That's tacky.” </span>
</p><p>“Ay.”</p><p>Robbie screamed again, just a quick beep of the horn, followed it with a tuneless jumble of notes that Gabe suspected was laughter. “Hey, now I've got two ways to make people piss themselves. Qué útil. Thanks, Tio.”</p><p>On the way to Wendy's, Gabe got on his phone and shopped for phones and tablets for Robbie at Best Buy.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Adapter</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Forgot about this one. A 15 minute (supposed to be) fic.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I found one,” Gabe announced, rolling up to Robbie's left door. Robbie opened it for him, and since he hadn't reacted otherwise, Gabe repeated himself, “I <em>found</em> one.”</p><p>Robbie's hearing wasn't too good for things on the outside of the cabin. “Found what?” he asked, putting curiosity into his tone.</p><p>Gabe threw his plastic shopping bag into the passenger seat and locked up his chair, prepared to transfer in. “An adapter. For the tape deck.”</p><p>“Oh!”</p><p>Gabe got himself slung into the driver's seat, buckled in, then leaned out to collapse the chair and heave it into the car, across the center console, and into the passenger side footwell. Robbie shut the door on him, started the engine, and rumbled out of the gas station parking lot, while Gabe retrieved his bag of road food and water bottles and a gadget like a cassette tape with an audio cord on it. He chewed on the impregnable plastic packaging, then pulled a can opener out of the driver's side door pocket. He managed to crush and wiggle and tear the plastic into submission after about ten minutes and six miles, and held up the adapter triumphantly in front of Robbie's rear-view mirror. “¿Quieres probar?”</p><p>Robbie took a few seconds to answer. “¿Tienes música buena?”</p><p>“I still have your unintelligible screaming and broken instruments being played way way too fast by depressed amateurs on PCP, yes,” Gabe said.</p><p>“Nobody plays on PCP,” Robbie protested. “They take half a forty-ounce and dump a Monster in it and drink that.”</p><p>“So <em>that's</em> what that sounds like.”</p><p>“Just because you listen to radio-ready sell-outs who farm out their bad poetry to some loner with a computer in his basement to pretty them up—”</p><p>“Hey, remixing is an art form,” Gabe said. “Here. Union 13.” He plugged his phone into the adapter and lifted the adapter to the Charger's tape deck, flipped it around until he figured out which way it was supposed to go. “Um. I'm gonna stick this in here.”</p><p>“Oh, are you.”</p><p>“Don't make it weird.” Gabe hesitated one last moment, then gently pressed the tape into the little slot on Robbie's radio. A motor grabbed it and tugged it in, down, and swallowed it, leaving the little aux cord sticking out. More motors whirred softly. Gabe leaned close and saw the little wheels in the cassette tape rotating. “How's that?”</p><p>“Little bland,” Robbie said. “Crunchy.”</p><p>“I'm gonna turn on the music.” Gabe pushed play, and from Robbie's speakers, very soft, came a rattle of drums. He turned up the volume, enough that he could hear it over the drone of Robbie's engine, and watched the tape deck expectantly.</p><p>A cacaphony of string instruments joined the drums, and then the lead singer, screaming, “¡Un! ¡Dia! ¡Mas!” and Robbie poured on the gas and abruptly accelerated, from a sustainable sixty to a very fun but very hot ninety miles an hour.</p><p>“Speeding!” Gabe warned him. Robbie slowed, reluctantly, but he started doing something weird with his gears, jolting the car and making the engine howl. Gabe noticed that he was trying to do it every time the song hit the chorus, except that not even having a music player wired into his body could cure Robbie's inherent lack of rhythm. Gabe patted the steering wheel, listening to the abrupt growls and whines from Robbie's mechanical parts and making apologetic faces at the cars they kept passing. “How you doing?”</p><p>“Fine,” Robbie said, cutting the music completely off for an instant and letting it start back up again as soon as he'd finished talking through the speakers.</p><p>“Is it good?” Gabe asked, staring down at his phone in concern as it pumped music through Robbie's sound system.</p><p>Robbie raised his windshield wipers emphatically, once.</p><p>
  <em>This isn't weird at all,</em>
  <span> Gabe thought sarcastically to himself as he watched Robbie's tachometer needle flick in and out of the red zone. He was pretty sure the red zone was bad. But Robbie had to know what he was doing, so he wouldn't hurt himself. Then again, he'd once watched Robbie pick a fight with a cholo who outweighed him by fifty pounds, drive them both home, and then spend the rest of the night puking angrily into the toilet because his head hurt so bad. Whenever one of the bands he roadied for had a gig on a Friday, he'd stay out until three in the morning helping them set up, running the light show, and then packing everything up afterward, even if he had to work the following Saturday; he'd just take a few energy drinks with him and sometimes come home with some minor injury he'd inflicted on himself in his sleep-deprived stupor. Robbie would never willingly damage a </span>
  <em>car,</em>
  <span> but he wasn't nearly so careful with himself.</span>
</p><p>And, sad as it was, it was just plain weird to see Robbie enjoying himself for more than a minute at a time.</p><p>
  <em>He's on vacation,</em>
  <span> Gabe figured. Robbie had never taken a vacation. He always worried about rent, bills, Gabe's grades, Gabe's extracurriculars, Gabe's friends, food, saving for technical college. Well, now they'd left Los Angeles hundreds of miles behind them, and Gabe could make all the money they needed out of leaves and garbage. Robbie wasn't under so much pressure anymore. He didn't have any responsibilities except for not running off the road or getting them pulled over by the cops, so he was probably feeling relieved, and he also didn't have any hands (</span>
  <em>Robbie doesn't have any fucking hands, oh God, what have I done</em>
  <span>) and he couldn't exactly read (</span>
  <em>oh fuck oh fuck. FUCK.</em>
  <span>) so he was probably a little bit bored, and maybe that was why Robbie seemed to go a little overboard whenever he got the chance to do anything he used to enjoy. It was (</span>
  <em>fuck. me.</em>
  <span>) fine. Robbie was doing fine, all things considered.</span>
</p><p>Gabe stared at the tachometer as Robbie whined and growled over the freeway.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Music For Our Great American Road Trip</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Written for the fan_flashworks challenge "jam".</p>
<p>Robbie and Gabe pick up a hitch-hiker. Robbie learns to be a synthesizer.</p>
<p>All Spanish here is, to my regret, Reverso Context and my limited recollections from college.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Huh,” Robbie said.</p>
<p>They were cruising northwest at sixty miles an hour over a two-lane highway through miles and miles of drab gray-green scrubland bounded on either side by barbed-wire fencing and distant rocky outcrops. Every ten minutes or so, they passed a big ranch house, or a herd of cows, or an abandoned field harvester. But mostly it was just the sandy ground, sparse dry clumps of grass, stands of cottonwood trees marking dry stream-beds. The current stretch of road they followed was so straight and flat that it seemed to vanish into stripy haze of heat waves in the distance.</p>
<p>Gabe looked up from Robbie's new Galaxy phone, on which he'd been setting up the voice assistant. “What?”</p>
<p>“There's a girl.”</p>
<p>Gabe squinted into the distance, then whipped his head around in case they'd passed her. “Where?”</p>
<p>“Ahead of us. Walking down the road.”</p>
<p>“Like a hitchhiker?”</p>
<p>“I guess.”</p>
<p>They slowed a bit. There was no one behind them; the last car they'd seen for the past twenty minutes had been a broken down little truck loaded with blue plastic barrels and dawdling along ten miles below the speed limit. Robbie proved to be right. A couple miles down the slope, and the girl came into view, red-haired, wearing denim-on-denim, with a rucksack at her feet and a guitar case slung over her back. There was nothing but barbed wire and bare hills in all directions. She had one thumb out, her arm lax at her side.</p>
<p>“That's not very safe,” Gabe said.</p>
<p>Robbie made a chuff of static through the radio, and slowed further, passed the girl and pulled over a hundred feet down the road. She jogged to catch them and Gabe started to haul his wheelchair into the back footwell, clear his books and papers off the passenger seat.</p>
<p>“Shit,” Gabe realized.</p>
<p>The girl was all the way at the door now. Robbie rolled the window down, the hand crank spinning on its own. She peered in. Her face was freckled and red from sunburn.</p>
<p>“Uh...where you headed?” Gabe asked.</p>
<p>“Coeur D'Alene.” She had a strong twang to her voice. Gabe didn't think anyone actually talked like that in real life. Robbie crackled the radio again, almost a snort. “That's in Idaho.”</p>
<p>Gabe raised his eyebrows. “Wow, us, too! Boise! You want to ride along?”</p>
<p>“Cain't exactly say no.” She peered in through the window, squinted at the chair and the papers piled on Robbie's back seat. “Us?”</p>
<p>Oops. “Me and the car. You know, when you're traveling, you start...talking to people who aren't there.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I get that,” the girl said, getting in. She smelled like she hadn't showered for a couple days, but then, so did Gabe. “Be nice to have someone new to talk to.”</p>
<p>She put her rucksack in the footwell, climbed in with her legs resting on top, hugged her guitar case on her lap, and buckled in. Robbie took off, a loud rev and then a controlled explosion of acceleration that propelled them to sixty miles an hour in well under ten seconds. The girl eeped. Gabe rested his hands on the wheel and tried to make it look like he was driving. He had no idea how to explain how he was using the pedals.</p>
<p>She glanced at his stumps, opened her mouth, and shut it.</p>
<p>Gabe stared down the road, the endless stones and sand and sparse tufts of dry grass. Robbie kept quiet, carrying them steadily toward Utah as his engine hummed, bone-deep, through the cabin. This was going to be very boring. “So. You play guitar?”</p>
<p>“Huh?” She blinked, then patted her guitar case as though she'd forgotten it was occupying her entire lap and scraping Robbie's ceiling. “Oh! Yeah. I mean, o'<em>course.</em> Ever since I was a little kid, I had lessons, but it's only since I left for—I guess I just had to get out into the world to find my passion, you know? To find something to say. So. Road trip!”</p>
<p>Gabe moved his left hand to the top of Robbie's wheel and leaned his right elbow on the armrest so he could face her, and look relaxed and cool like in the movies. She was way older than him, probably college-aged, but that didn't mean he had to act nervous. He nodded and tried to think up something interesting to add that wouldn't incriminate himself. Playing NPCs and delivering backstory at the kitchen table for his friends was one thing, but inventing cover stories for his actual life was completely different.</p>
<p>He heard a clicking noise. Robbie was blinking his right turn signal. Gabe put both hands on the wheel again, ten and two, and Robbie stopped. Gabe glared at the rearview mirror.</p>
<p>“I can't believe we're headed to the same state,” he said. “What a coincidence. You're like a wandering bard and I'm, um—” <em>a necromancer— </em>“Um. A wizard? I guess? 'Cause I don't have many hit points? Anyway what were you doing hitching on the side of the road there? Pretty empty.”</p>
<p>She smiled very wide, and her eyes looked tight. “I caught a ride but I had ta ditch in a hurry.”</p>
<p>Robbie sped up, then did the weird down-shifting thing with his transmission that sent his tachometer high into the red for a moment. Gabe patted the steering wheel and he settled back to his normal cruising gear.</p>
<p>“But you seem nice,” she continued. “So like. All's well that ends well!” Her twangy accent vanished.</p>
<p>“It's an adventure,” Gabe agreed.</p>
<p>They rode along, mutually agreeing not to talk about how much fun they were or were not having on this adventure. Gabe's hands were sweating against Robbie's wheel. He wanted to look around. He wanted to read his alchemy notes and try to figure out what symbol he could have possibly transposed to change an information-seeking array into one for human transmutation. He wanted to finish setting up Bixby for Robbie's new phone. He thought about turning on Robbie's radio, but there weren't many options out in the desert, and he couldn't exactly ask Robbie for permission.</p>
<p>Actually...why not. If Gabe couldn't talk to Robbie for the next five hundred miles, he might as well be alone in the car. It would be horrible. He already couldn't stand it when Robbie was silent for more than an hour at a time; he started wondering if he'd imagined his voice all along. And he was so terribly bored. “I should introduce you to Robbie,” Gabe said.</p>
<p>“Where?” the girl asked, peering into the back seat. It struck Gabe that she must be looking for an animal. Robbie made a recalcitrant squawk with his speakers.</p>
<p>“Robbie's the computer who controls the car,” Gabe announced. “Robbie, say hi.”</p>
<p>Silence. The girl raised her eyebrows, then reached into the top of her rucksack, keeping her hand out of view.</p>
<p>Gabe glared at the radio, then took both his hands off the steering wheel. “Robbie. It makes sense. I don't have any feet. Say hi.”</p>
<p>“Hi,” Robbie said at last, drawing it out. Watching the girl, Gabe noticed for the first time all day how obviously synthesized Robbie's voice was, despite his quick progress in making himself understandable. “Uh...yeah. I'm the computer.”</p>
<p>The girl peered at the radio, took her empty hand back out of her bag. “That's cute. Is that a recording or an AI?”</p>
<p>“AI,” Robbie buzzed. “I'm a high-perfor-mance ECU, I manage intake charge richness and ignition timing. <em>Uhhhh, </em>and steering, throttle, braking, na-vi-ga-tion, all that. Lots of sensors, and, uh, motors. My name's Roberto, that stands for Remote Operated—no. Racing Optimized...Buh...what's your name?”</p>
<p>“Lisa,” said the girl slowly.</p>
<p>“I'm Gabe,” Gabe said. “Gabriél.”</p>
<p>“Pleased to meet you, Lisa.”</p>
<p>“So that's how you were driving,” Lisa said, glancing at Gabe's stumps again. “I didn't want to, like, ask.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, Robbie takes care of everything,” Gabe said, reclining his seat to he could reach into the back and grab his stapled-together pile of alchemy diagrams.</p>
<p>“Why's he have an accent?”</p>
<p>“Why do <em>you</em> have an accent?” Gabe snapped, grabbing the hub of Robbie's wheel protectively.</p>
<p>Lisa banged her head against the neck of her guitar case. “Ohmigod. Ignore me. I meant, like, he sounds like the guys from back home.”</p>
<p>“Don't talk about him like he's not there.”</p>
<p>“Gabe, cálmate. It's fine. So. Lisa. You can ride with us as far as Boise if you want, but we have to stop in Salt Lake City—”</p>
<p>“Wait? Why?” Gabe interrupted.</p>
<p>“So you can get out and sleep and—”</p>
<p>“What, stretch my legs? It's just fourteen hours.”</p>
<p>“Don't you have...rehab? Something, for your hips?”</p>
<p>“It's fine. I'll do it later. I can sit in the chair, or I can sit in—in you, and you're a lot more comfortable. It's fine.”</p>
<p>Robbie squawked and went silent for a moment. Then, “We're stopping in Salt Lake City.”</p>
<p>Gabe growled.</p>
<p>Lisa squinted at the radio. “Doesn't he—I mean, Roberto, don't you have the Three Laws?”</p>
<p>Gabe glanced at her, surprised. She didn't seem like the type who read classic sci-fi—</p>
<p>“I like Will Smith,” Lisa explained. “So...who's in charge here?”</p>
<p>Gabe stared up at his uncertain face in Robbie's rearview mirror. Robbie twitched his windshield wipers. The silence stretched until they spoke over each-other.</p>
<p>“Gabe.”</p>
<p>“Robbie.”</p>
<p>“Mierda, soy el coche, no puedo estar a cargo,” Robbie griped. “Uh, Lisa. Don't worry. I would never, ever hurt—uh, well.”</p>
<p>Gabe didn't like how long Robbie paused here, but he wasn't exactly surprised. Robbie had never put anybody in the ER who didn't have it coming, but that made two people that Gabe knew about so far. And on top of that he had his violent panic attacks. “So what's with the guitar?” Gabe asked.</p>
<p>“I'd protect Gabe with my life,” Robbie finished, which was just embarrassing and probably not what Lisa needed to hear to defuse the whole <em>you've hitched a ride in a sentient car</em> bombshell. “And, uh. You, too.” Gabe could hear the <em>I guess</em> lingering unspoken in the air.</p>
<p>“The guitar?” Gabe insisted. “It looks really heavy.”</p>
<p>Lisa's eyes shifted from Gabe, to Robbie's radio, and back to Gabe. “Actually it's super light,” she said at last. “It's acoustic. Spruce and maple. My dad got it for me when I got accepted to UCLA, want to see?”</p>
<p>“Yes, please.”</p>
<p>She unlatched the guitar case, frowned, and then re-latched it, shoved it backwards behind Robbie's driver's seat, and then twisted herself around to open it in the back where there was room. She tenderly maneuvered a blond wood guitar with a red fretboard onto her lap and strummed a chord.</p>
<p>“Cool,” Gabe said. He dug his phone out of the pocket of his jacket, which he'd stuffed between his seat and Robbie's center console. “Here's my iPhone, Robbie got it when we—uh, I mean, um.” Cars couldn't buy their brothers <em>Hooray! We're finally out of the foster system!</em> celebratory used iPhones. He put his phone back. “Do you play? You said you play?”</p>
<p>Lisa gave no sign that she'd noticed how very, very bad at lying they were. <em>Backstory,</em> Gabe told himself. <em>It's just our backstory, it has to make sense. </em>She reached back into her case for a pick, plucked out a cheery little melody, and then started to sing. She had an easy, pleasant voice that blended with the warm notes she strummed from the guitar. Her exaggerated drawl came back. “<em>Oh, I had a little horse, the purdiest buckskin you saw, and I rode him through the forest. A big black crow began to caw</em>...I'm still working on the first few stanzas, I had to, like, scrap them and start over.”</p>
<p>“You had a horse?” Gabe asked. That was one weakness he had as a dungeon master: the party always needed a horse to carry their loot, and he had to role-play it because it was an NPC, but he'd never even touched a horse before.</p>
<p>Lisa grimaced. “No, I made that up. But it's Country, I have to sing about horses. I wish I had a horse. I volunteered at a horse rescue for a summer and I got to feed them and walk them.”</p>
<p>“How was that?”</p>
<p>“One took off running while I was holding her and gave me a concussion.”</p>
<p>“Ay.”</p>
<p>“She's the sweetest. Her name's Pansy. She's scared of plastic bags.”</p>
<p>“You should write a song about that,” Gabe suggested. “<em>My horse saw a plastic bag...cracked my head...now I can't remember...who I am!</em>”</p>
<p>Lisa strummed along with him, and made a credible effort at keeping in tune, which was impressive because Gabe didn't know what tune he was trying to sing himself. “Sure, it could be funny,” she said, “but I need the <em>theme.</em> The <em>culture.</em> The <em>ambiance.</em> Like, one amusing anecdote does not a country ballad make.”</p>
<p>“Like a metaphor?”</p>
<p>“Like <em>context,</em>” Lisa said, the rhythm of her words and the manic intensity of her expression making her seem slightly deranged. “I have to <em>be</em> Country. <em>Experience</em> Country.”</p>
<p>Gabe squinted at her. “Why? Why not just sing Country songs about your life?” Robbie agreed with a skeptical whistle.</p>
<p>“I, um. Hm.” She stared down the road and drummed her fingers on the body of her guitar. “I want to...I'm striking out on my own, right? This is when I establish who I am as an artist. And I want who I am to be, like, <em>on purpose.</em> I wasn't one of those deep emo kids who's always drawing sharpie on their arms, you know? I never had like a <em>persona.</em> But Country music is cool. I mean, a lot of the new stuff's sorta lame, but I like the sound. I like acoustics, it's not super aggressive. And nobody back home listened to it, so I feel like I picked it for me. But I can't just use the genre to sing about whatever's convenient. I got to walk the walk.”</p>
<p>“So you're hitch-hi-king alone through Nowhere, USA,” Robbie summarized.</p>
<p>“Look who's talking.”</p>
<p>Robbie crackled his speakers.</p>
<p>“No te preocupes,” Gabe said, patting Robbie's dashboard.</p>
<p>“Si, me preocupo. Lisa, we can get you a motel room. We can take you to Boise.” Robbie twitched his mirror at Gabe. “¿Podremos? ¿No?”</p>
<p>Gabe dug his wad of alchemized twenties out of his pocket and riffled through them. He'd have to make more when they stopped. “Sure.”</p>
<p>“No,” Lisa protested. “You guys—don't worry—”</p>
<p>“Just promise me you'll get a bus ticket after,” Robbie insisted. “Please. We can give you the money.”</p>
<p>Lisa glared at his radio, then his rear-view mirror. “You're really opinionated for a computer.”</p>
<p>Robbie let out a two-toned rumble and squeal like a microphone cable getting clumsily plugged in to an over-powered amplifier. It was frustration in audible form, and it raised the hairs on the back of Gabe's neck. “Humor me,” he buzzed. Then, softer and slower and more lifelike, “I don't want you getting hurt.”</p>
<p>Lisa glared at his mirror, then threw up her hands, hooked her pinkies together. “Okay! Whatevs! I'll take the Greyhound to Coeur D'Alene. But I know how to take care of myself. You should see the block I grew up on.”</p>
<p>“Yeah, so you know how important it is to have people watching your back,” Gabe said.</p>
<p>“Right.”</p>
<p>Robbie whistled in agreement. He rumbled over the road, downshifting to slow for a little clump of ranch houses surrounding a billboard, a bar, a silo, and a gas station.</p>
<p>“Slower,” Gabe said, watching his speedometer for him. “Little slower...okay, thirty-five.”</p>
<p>Robbie's speed steadied to the new speed limit, until the town's single stoplight turned yellow, then red. He eased to a halt, and his idle shook the whole car.</p>
<p>“Ooh, look at that old post office,” Lisa said, pulling out her smart phone to take a picture. The windows were dusty, and the letters on the awning looked like they'd kept the same design since 1950.</p>
<p>There was no one at the cross street. When the light finally turned green again, Robbie revved up and took off, more gently than usual but still rocking Gabe and Lisa backward in his seats. “Sorry,” Robbie said. “High-stall torque converter, I'm still figuring out how to work around it.”</p>
<p>“Weird.” Lisa spun in her seat and pointed out the window. “Cows!”</p>
<p>“Cool!” Gabe said. “Aw, there's babies!”</p>
<p>Robbie twitched his rear-view and side mirrors toward the cows as they passed them. “They're so big.”</p>
<p>“Never gets old,” Gabe agreed.</p>
<p>They crossed the state line from Colorado to Utah: more rocks, more grass, more thin three-line barbed wire fences, more endless straight two-lane highway. Here and there, hawks perched on the metal fence posts. The sun swung from high in the sky on their right to high in the sky on their left.</p>
<p>Lisa strummed her guitar and hummed, relaxing into Robbie's passenger seat. “Uh, Robbie. Do you synth?”</p>
<p>“What?”</p>
<p>“Can you synthesize a drumbeat? Maybe a bassline?”</p>
<p>Robbie buzzed uncertainly. “Are you asking me to play music with you?”</p>
<p>“He's not very—”</p>
<p>“I'm not very good at that.”</p>
<p>“You can't, like, download an app for it?” Lisa asked.</p>
<p>“I don't work that way.”</p>
<p>“He doesn't connect to the Internet. He'd get a virus.”</p>
<p>“I'm an ECU, I control the engine.”</p>
<p>“But you <em>talk,</em>” Lisa said.</p>
<p>“I can't sing, though.”</p>
<p>“Why not? Like, would it distract you from driving?”</p>
<p>“No,” Robbie hummed. “I'm just not good at it.”</p>
<p>“But you can learn, right? I mean, since you talk, I assume you can learn.”</p>
<p>“Of course I can learn, I'm an ECU,” Robbie said, quick and choppy.</p>
<p>“Do you <em>want</em> to learn?” Lisa shook her head. “Sorry, I guess that's kind of human-centric. See, most humans care about music—”</p>
<p>“Robbie loves music.”</p>
<p>“I like music, I'm just not good at it.”</p>
<p>“You don't have to be good at it to have fun,” Lisa said. “Ohmigod. <em>Can</em> you have fun?”</p>
<p>Gabe caught his breath and watched Robbie's mirror. His rear-view mirror was pointed at Lisa at the moment, so Gabe turned to the side mirror, stared into his own anxious face and wide eyes.</p>
<p>“I can have fun,” Robbie enunciated.</p>
<p>“That's so cool.” Lisa strummed up and down rapidly, <em>rum-a-rum-a-rum-a-rummmmm.</em> “Let me teach you a drumbeat. Then we can jam.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” Robbie said dubiously.</p>
<p>Lisa picked a little tune on her guitar, then shook her head. Tried another one, and another. Got out her phone and scrolled through a playlist. “Can you, like, imitate sounds?”</p>
<p>“The-oretic-ly.” He finished with a soft buzz and a whoop. “It takes practice.”</p>
<p>“Super! Okay, this one's a good one.” She put her phone away. “It's really simple and everyone loves it. You just do a two-beat rhythm, okay?” She patted Robbie's glove box with the flat of her hand, then with the backs of her fingernails. <em>Thump, click, thump, click, thump, click. </em></p>
<p>Robbie crackled, squealed, wavered up and down the range of pitches the Charger's speakers could emit.</p>
<p>Lisa frowned. “Maybe we should just work on one sound at a time.” <em>Thump, thump, thump, thump.</em> “Try that.”</p>
<p>Robbie let out a crack, a buzz, a pop, the syllable <em>dum</em>, a <em>pew</em> sound like a ray gun in a bad sci-fi movie, and then a deep <em>thunk</em>.</p>
<p>“That,” Lisa interrupted. “Can you do that again?”</p>
<p>
  <em>Thunk. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk.</em>
</p>
<p>“<span>Awesome. That's your down beat, um, like your kick drum. Now you need something with a higher pitch, a bit sharper.” </span><em>Click.</em><span> “Maybe with a little rattling sound.” She tapped her fingernails on his glove compartment again, separating them slightly to make a rolling </span><em>rrrrk.</em></p>
<p>“Rick,” said Robbie. He repeated it, adjusting the pitch up and down. <em>Rick, rick, rick, rick, rick.</em></p>
<p>Gabe had never watched Robbie learning from someone else before. He knew Robbie was good at school, he was smart, he could figure things out and do research, but he'd never seen Robbie focused and learning from another person, just like Gabe kept trying to, pounding away at history and trigonometry and never getting anywhere. It wasn't that everything came easy to Robbie, Gabe realized. Robbie just worked really hard at everything he did. <em>Why can't I be like that?</em> he wondered. He stared down at the alchemy diagrams on his lap. If he could work as hard at school as he did at alchemy, he'd probably be in all AP classes and Robbie would be proud of him, not having a panic attack once a month over Gabe's grades.</p>
<p>He shook his head, re-oriented himself to the here-and-now. He wasn't going back to school until he fixed Robbie. Robbie was on vacation because Gabe had turned him into a car, and he shouldn't be having any panic attacks.</p>
<p>“Okay, now put them together,” Lisa was saying, and Robbie's speakers went <em>thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk, rick,</em> halting at first, then steadier and steadier. “Okay, speed it up a little.” Robbie's noises started to smooth out and speed up into a clear and completely recognizable synthetic drumbeat. Lisa nodded her head in time, and after about thirty seconds, she strummed her guitar and began to sing. “<em>On the road again—</em>”</p>
<p>Robbie stopped.</p>
<p>“What's up?”</p>
<p>Robbie croaked. “Sorry, I was surprised.”</p>
<p>“That's fine. You sound great! Let's start again.”</p>
<p>
  <em>Thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk, rick.</em>
</p>
<p>“<em>On the road again! Just can't wait to get on the road again.</em><span>” She played chords to her own melody, strumming in time with Robbie's beat. “</span><em>The life I love is making music with my friends, and I can't wait to get on the road again.</em><span>”</span></p>
<p>
  <span>Gabe's jaw dropped. Robbie thunked and ricked steadily, and the chords from the guitar backed up the melody Lisa sang, and it all blended together into a sweet synthetic whole. And all Robbie had to do was </span>
  <em>thunk, rick.</em>
  <span> Robbie turned his rear view mirror toward Gabe, and Gabe flashed two thumbs-up at his own awestruck face.</span>
</p>
<p>“<span>Come on, Gabe, whistle something,” Lisa said between verses, still strumming along with Robbie.</span></p>
<p>“<span>Me?” This was Robbie's time. Robbie was not-sucking at music. This was a miracle. “What should I—” </span></p>
<p>“<span>I don't know, just whistle. You've got to whistle along to Willie Nelson. Jam with us!”</span></p>
<p>
  <span>Robbie raised his windshield wipers, and Gabe took that as encouragement. He whistled. He had no idea what he was supposed to whistle, so he did something that was half </span>
  <em>On The Road Again</em>
  <span> and half advertising jingle. He felt stupid, but Lisa kept playing along and nodding for him to continue until he ran out of breath, then she picked back up with the last verse and closed out the song with a long sustained chord.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <em>Thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk...</em>
  <span> “Am I done?” Robbie asked.</span>
</p>
<p>“<span>Yeah, that's the end. You want to try again? You want to learn a walking bass line?”</span></p>
<p>
  <span>Robbie squealed his speakers. “Si!” </span>
  <em>Thunk, rick.</em>
  <span> “Maybe,” he amended. “Can I practice the beat thing first?”</span>
</p>
<p>“<span>Of course!” Lisa scrolled through her phone again. “I got another one that'll work with that one-two beat. Want to go?”</span></p>
<p>
  <span>Robbie revved and surged forward.</span>
</p>
<p>“<span>Speeding,” Gabe reminded him. “Eighty, uh, seventy-five, oh, okay, sixty-five.”</span></p>
<p>“<span>Thanks,” Robbie said. </span><em>Thunk, rick, thunk, rick, thunk, rick.</em><span> He flicked his windshield wipers, </span><em>I'm ready</em><span>, and Lisa gripped the neck of her guitar and strummed out new chords. They rolled north-west, strumming and singing and whistling and synthesizing, and Gabe's big brother, always listening to music and carrying musicians and their equipment around LA in his van or his stripped-out Dodge Neon, for the first time in his life was part of a band. Gabe kept both hands on Robbie's wheel so Robbie could concentrate on the music. He was having fun. Was he relaxed? Gabe couldn't tell, but he thought he had to be.</span></p>
<p>
  <span>Mierda. Maybe if Tio had been around to take them in instead of foster care, Robbie could have had some fucking music lessons.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>I f*king hate Country Music. Willie Nelson gets a pass.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Salt</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>When you've been turned into a car, you've got to go drive on the Bonneville Salt Flats.</p><p>It's the experience of a lifetime.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Written for the fan-flashworks prompt, "drive," with some editing afterward.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The night was clear and sharp in Salt Lake City, and the streets quieted after ten. (“Hey, Bixby, what time is it?” Robbie could ask his new phone, rubber-banded to the back of his driver's seat, and Bixby, the actual artificial intelligence, would answer. “Hey, Bixby, play Union-13 music...Not track 13, Union-13. Hey Bixby, play music, play artist Union-13...” “Hey, Bixby, what is the driving distance from Salt Lake City to Boise?”) Dawn broke pale greenish-yellow, shoving aside the blue of twilight, and cars began to roll by, beyond the motel parking lot where Robbie stared at Gabe's room and waited for him to come out.</p><p>He watched a man in a rumpled suit leave a second-floor room behind him, two men in canvas chore coats with safety stripes leave another room beside him. And he saw Lisa creep out of her own room, on the opposite end of the motel from Gabe, guitar case in her hand and rucksack slung over her back.</p><p>It shouldn't surprise him that she was leaving; Gabe was way friendlier than most people, and they'd paid for her dinner and her room for no obvious reason, and Robbie was a sketchy AI. It was only natural to take her chances with somebody less weird.</p><p>She looked at him, and her shoulders seemed to slump. He watched her make her way to the rock garden under the motel sign and sit down, leaning against the steel pole. She tipped her head back and lowered her hat over her eyes like the Marlboro man. Robbie aimed his mirrors at her, so he could keep an eye out. Every time someone new packed up and left the motel, she'd pick her head up, alarmed, and then find him and relax again. He realized she wasn't disappointed that he was still here; maybe she'd been worried that he and Gabe would be gone.</p><p>
  <span>Robbie wished he had a normal-sounding horn to beep, instead of </span>
  <em>agonized screaming.</em>
  <span> He rolled down his windows, turned on his electricals, and did the drumbeat she'd taught him yesterday, </span>
  <em>thump-rick, thump-rick,</em>
  <span> and then the bass line he'd sort-of mastered, </span>
  <em>dum da dee da dee da deedly-dum.</em>
  <span> She looked up at him again, and he activated his brakelights. She carried her bag and guitar across the parking lot to him and peered in through the window. “You can sit if you like,” he said.</span>
</p><p>“Gabe won't mind?”</p><p>Robbie crackled. Gabe? Make a nice girl nap outside on a pile of rocks? “Claro que no. Of course not.” Only as Lisa opened his door and flipped down his passenger seat so she could stuff her things in the back did Robbie realize that she thought Gabe owned him. Which, Gabe did. He'd bought him from a drug dealer for ten thousand counterfeit dollars.</p><p>She got in and laid his seat back and went back to napping. That is, she tried. Her back felt a little tense and she kept shuffling her boots on his carpet. At last she took her hat off and hugged it to her chest. “Are you, like, on? All the time?”</p><p>“Yeah,” Robbie admitted. This was not typical ECU behavior, but how else would he explain how he'd been watching her? “It's a...security feature.”</p><p>“You just invited a hitchhiker to sit in you.”</p><p>Robbie didn't have a good answer to that.</p><p>Lisa half-slitted her eyes and her shoulders relaxed, but she kept glancing at his rearview mirror until he turned it away toward the driver's seat. He could still see her with the side mirror; she watched the sky lighten, and finally seemed to doze off just before Gabe's door opened and Gabe rolled out. Gabe looked exhausted, shoulders bowed as he shoved himself over the sidewalk toward the wheelchair cut, but he gave Robbie a grin and a wave. Robbie opened his driver's side door for him, and Lisa startled upright. His seat was cold where her back had been.</p><p>“Hey, you two,” Gabe said, slinging his backpack into Robbie's footwell, where it bumped against the brake pedal. “Sleep well?”</p><p>Oh, god. If his engine were running, Robbie knew he'd feel mortified. “She looked uncomfortable.”</p><p>“I slept fine,” Lisa corrected, at Gabe's puzzled look. “Just getting a head start, is all.”</p><p>“Sweet!” Gabe hauled himself into the driver's seat and thumped in, scooted himself around until he faced front, then buckled up. Robbie watched him in his rear-view mirror and felt the shifts of his weight on the springs as he unlocked and spun the chair around. He clenched the shoulder belt spool to give Gabe something to brace against as he leaned out.</p><p>“Can I help you with that?” Lisa offered.</p><p>“Please.”</p><p>She got out and helped Gabe fold his chair and stuff it in the back seat, which took about as long as usual, and looked twice as awkward but much less difficult for Gabe. When they were seated and stowed and buckled, he started up and let Gabe direct him to a McDonald's drive-thru for breakfast and an Arco for gas, then out on the main drag toward the highway.</p><p>A left-turn at the light led him from the cramped and pockmarked city streets to a smooth, broad, curving onramp. His engine was warm and ready, and he opened his throttle, revved up until his torque converter finally locked on to his transmission, and accelerated, tires flexing, front bumper rising, blower shrieking as it packed air and fuel into his engine. The road raced by beneath him faster and faster, the onramp straightened as it blended with the highway, and he watched in his left-hand mirrors and windows for other cars coming up behind him as his lane began to narrow.</p><p>He was going way too fast. He blew past a pick-up truck, merged, braked, squeezed into a gap behind an Excursion. A big SUV was hard to see around in the best of circumstances, but from his new point of view three feet above the ground, even a sedan gave him problems, especially if it was wide. He wobbled from side to side in his lane, peeking around the cars in front of him with one headlight at a time, feathered down his throttle to hold himself steady within the flow of traffic, and settled in to the now-familiar routine of driving, ceaselessly, from one gas station to the next.</p><p>Except it wasn't really driving, was it.</p><p>It was more like running, since he was moving under his own power, or maybe luge, since he was going so fast and so low. Sports had been more Gabe's thing, but Robbie had always applied himself as best he could in all his classes, PE included, boxing team in Junior Year especially, and the closest experience he could remember to what he was feeling now was those times Coach Lukashenko had made the team circle the Lincoln High campus five times for aerobic training, one foot in front of the other, panting for air lap after lap, until some switch flipped in his brain and Robbie felt his legs and his heart and his lungs all moving on their own, automatic, and all he had to do was watch the sidewalk underfoot and point himself in the right direction while his body took care of the rest.</p><p>He didn't have legs that moved step-by-step anymore, he had wheels, and he didn't have lungs that breathed in and out, he had the Roots blower pulling air into his intake manifold, and he didn't have a heartbeat, he had RPMs. As complex a machine as the Charger was, it was so much simpler than a human body. Fewer parts, fewer functions. He could draw out the gears that separated his heart from his drive wheels on a napkin.</p><p>Well. Maybe Bixby could.</p><p>As frustrating and alien to his human experience as it was to hurl himself along the freeway at seventy miles an hour, surrounded by other, inanimate, cars, driving was the closest Robbie felt to being alive since his accident. When his engine was still, he felt dead.</p><p>“Uh, Gabe?” Lisa asked, twenty miles into the wasteland of gray rocks and hardy evergreen shrubs beyond the Great Salt Lake. “Why are we going west?”</p><p>They were going west, weren't they. The sun was behind them, and the signs had said Westbound I-80. Robbie had assumed it was just a weird signage thing. “Gabe?”</p><p>“Scenic detour!” Gabe announced, patting Robbie's door.</p><p>“Detour?” Robbie and Lisa's questions overlapped each-other.</p><p>“We'll get to Boise. It's just a few hours out of our way.”</p><p>“Hours?” Robbie asked. “Gabe. You can't just spring that on people, Lisa's got to—what was it, that music festival thing—”</p><p>“It's okay,” Lisa said, smiling. Her legs felt tense on his seat, and her ribs heaved with a deep, slow breath. “That's not for another three days. You guys are so generous! Road trip! Scenic detour!”</p><p>Gabe frowned. “Sorry, I guess I should have told you. But this is gonna be great! It's a destination! You're gonna love it.”</p><p>“Where are we going?” Robbie asked.</p><p>Gabe checked his phone. “Uh, in about fifteen miles it's gonna get real obvious.”</p><p>
  <span>The road took a gradual downward slope between sterile stone outcrops and fencing that contained nothing but sagebrush and gravel. Lisa played more Country songs and Robbie practiced humming the bass lines she'd taught him yesterday while Gabe patted his door to do the drumbeat. They took a break and Lisa talked about college. “So, my dad wants me to major in business. I was like, what </span>
  <em>is</em>
  <span> business? Which business? Like, that's not a real </span>
  <em>thing,</em>
  <span> like, music is a thing. Astronomy is a thing. And he got me the guitar, which was super sweet, but I think he's regretting it now, because I think he meant it as, like, a toy, you know, something to do on study breaks. I wanted to go into journalism, but that's, um. Not the best industry to get into right now, you know? All these newspapers folding all the time, and the Sinclair Broadcasting thing. But music, um. Music makes me happy, but if you want to do it for a living, you got to treat it like a business, or the business is gonna chew you up. I could go on and on about all the talented singer-songwriters who lost the rights to their music and the shirt off their back with the same contract. So.” She hummed. “You ever hear </span>
  <em>Devil Went Down To Georgia?</em>
  <span> It's funny, 'cause you can supposedly get one over on the Devil by being the best fiddler who's ever been, but to get a good recording contract, you have to be a business major.”</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Gabe slid the cassette adapter into Robbie's tape deck, and Lisa plugged in her phone and played the background music for her </span>
  <em>Devil</em>
  <span> cover that would be part of her set when she got to Coeur D'Alene, strumming and singing along, and then she moved into an original song, the one about riding a horse through the woods.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When she finished, Robbie had Gabe put on one of </span>
  <em>Almas Perdidas</em>
  <span>' tamer albums that the band had recorded in their bass player's garage two years ago. Robbie had helped them staple newspapers and blankets to the walls and ceiling for sound deadening. In exchange, they'd given him half a pizza and an old lawnmower that he'd eventually managed to get running and sold on Craigslist for a hundred bucks.</span>
</p><p>“<span>They're local,” Robbie explained, trying to synthesize his voice with just one speaker so as not to interrupt Jesús's guitar licks. It was sort-of working. “There's no high-paying gigs in Hillrock Heights where they're from, but they work their asses off every weekend and now they play all over the Los Angeles metro area. You want their music, you can download it direct from their website, the top tracks are free, and the rest is five dollars. No record company, no middleman.”</span></p><p>“I'm sorry, did you say Hillrock Heights?” Lisa cut in.</p><p>“<span>Yeah, sorry, it's a little neighborhood in East Los,” Robbie said. </span><em>The worst neighborhood in East Los.</em><span> “Punk scene's pretty much all we got going on, besides, uh. Oh, this is the best part.” He fell silent while Jesús and Eduardo did their dueling guitar-solo/shouting rap coda to </span><em>770 Metro. </em><span>It was a struggle to keep the butterfly valve in his throttle body at a steady angle; when he was human he'd always wanted to stomp his feet to this part, and now he was a car, he wanted to speed up. Which would probably total the vintage Ford Ranger in front of him.</span></p><p>“Weird,” Lisa said.</p><p>Gabe stopped bouncing in his seat in time to the music. “What's weird?”</p><p>“Oh, just a weird coincidence. Never mind.”</p><p>The slope of the highway bottomed out into an endless straight-away to the west, and the brightest mirage Robbie had yet seen on this trip, beating out the heat waves on the road through Arizona. The hills and shrubs ended sharply at a broad, white, rock-strewn expanse of...</p><p>
  <em>Salt Lake City.</em>
  <span> Salt. Robbie squealed and almost rear-ended the Ford Ranger. He had to brake harder than he wanted, and Gabe and Lisa lurched forward into the shoulderbelts. He downshifted to second gear and his engine roared, valvetrain fluttering, blower whistling as he held his speed, then when he felt ready to calm down, he relaxed his transmission and let himself shift back to third. “Ssorry,” he buzzed.</span>
</p><p>
  <em>Welcome to the Salt Lake Desert</em>
  <span>, read a big brown sign beside the highway.</span>
</p><p>Gabe cackled. “Told you you'd like it!”</p><p>Robbie struggled to hold a steady following distance as they descended to the bottom of the rocky basin, into the ancient briny lakebed.</p><p>The lake sparkled white and cream, and tiny round bushes studded the shoreline. The road became a narrow straight causeway, cutting the vast salt pan in two. They passed a sunken truck, probably a 1960's Ford farm truck, and a 90's Blazer, abandoned to rust away long ago after sinking in the wet seasons' mud. Right now the salt on either side of the raised highway looked hard and dry. The highway Robbie ran along seemed so narrow, just forty feet of asphalt strip under his wheels, while on either side of him—after a five-foot drop—lay the glorious white canvas onto which decades of drivers and mechanics and machines had carved their triumphs.</p><p>“The Speedway's another forty miles,” Gabe announced, rolling his window down a crack. Lisa copied him. They'd set out early that morning, but they'd been on the road for forty miles already, the air was starting to warm, and the salt pan bounced the heat and light right back up at them. “See, there's still rocks out here, the salt's too thin.”</p><p>“That's where they do all those car experiments, right?” Lisa said. “No, wait, wait. The world records.”</p><p>“Land speed rrecords,” Robbie explained. “Every year the Southern California Timing Association runs Speed Week at Bonneville Speedway. Teams come from all over the world to set new mile times. This year, uh.” This year, Speed Week had passed while Robbie had been dissociating in the police impound lot, or maybe on blocks in Grumpy's front yard. “This year I don't know if they broke any big ones.”</p><p>“I'll check,” Gabe offered, pulling out his phone. “Um. Here, um. Wait, I think this might be it. No...”</p><p>“You like racing?” Lisa asked. “Wait, what am I talking about. You're a racing computer. I don't know why I'm surprised.”</p><p>“Robbie likes lots of things,” Gabe said. “He's well-rounded.”</p><p>That was nice, but Robbie as a human being had devoted himself to Gabe, cars, and local music in that order. He didn't think that qualified as well-rounded.</p><p>
  <span>They roared across the road through the salt pan, hills rising up in the distance all around them. Robbie tried to explain the Bonneville Speedway to Lisa so she could properly appreciate the experience. “It's the biggest racing arena in the world. There's </span>
  <em>nothing</em>
  <span> to hit, there's no turns, there's no lanes. Traction's not so good, but once a car gets moving, it can just go all out, full throttle. It's a flying mile, they can take a mile or two to get up to speed. It's all about horsepower; teams don't have to worry about torque or handling like for drag or autocross racing, so there's really cool, specialized builds that come here, like the Turbinator. The fastest wheel-driven car ever, four hundred twenty-seven miles per hour. That record's stood since the 90's. It's insane, it looks like that airplane, the long skinny spy plane thing—like a rocket. Designed for the salt flats. There's no other race you'll see a build like that. Knocking down world records is all it does. But there's so many classes, they break it down by engine displacement and body style, so somebody sets a new record every year with </span>
  <em>something.</em>
  <span> There's a class for mini pick-up trucks; last I checked the record-holder is a Volkswagen called the White Goose, a Rabbit platform. There's classes for steam-engines. Electric. Motorcycles.”</span>
</p><p>“Okay, I got this year's records,” Gabe said. “You want me to, uh.” He licked his lips and scrolled up and down on his phone. “I mean, there's a lot.”</p><p>Robbie wished he had hands. Maybe he could have Bixby read the race results to him tonight. “Did Turbinator come back?”</p><p>“Turbinator II,” Gabe read. “Hey, didn't you say the record was four twenty-something? This one did four fifty-five.”</p><p>Robbie squealed and crackled. “Wow. Wow! What's the upgrade, what's the engine displacement?”</p><p>Gabe squinted. “It says a '3' engine and a 'T' body.”</p><p>“No, that's got to be a typo. Engine classes are letters.”</p><p>“I dunno what to tell you.”</p><p>Robbie crackled and sped up a little, slowed when he got too close to the Ranger again. “Four fifty-five. Wow.”</p><p>“Some funky names on these cars,” Gabe remarked. “Wagon A Go-Go.”</p><p>“What's that?” Lisa asked.</p><p>“It's a 'G' 'CGC' that went a hundred and eighteen miles an hour, apparently.”</p><p>Robbie focused on the road as he tried to recall the meaning behind the letter codes. “Uh, small-displacement, maybe a hundred cubic inch engine, and I think 'Classic Gas Coupe.' So, a classic car with a small engine, and I think the builders can only use period-correct parts. Makes it harder.”</p><p>“Most of these guys just name their cars after their teams,” Gabe said. “Lame.” He scrolled down the list some more. “Wait, wait, some car's got three different records, it's just called 'The Big Red Camaro.'”</p><p>
  <span>Robbie gasped with his butterfly valve and lunged forward involuntarily along the road. “</span>
  <em>Brzzz</em>
  <span>rry. Sorry. BikRed? Big Red!” This year's salt crust had Big Red's tiretracks carved into it! </span>
</p><p>“What's Big Red?” Lisa asked. “Besides a Camaro.”</p><p>
  <span>What was Big Red. “Bick Red is anytheen it wantz to bve,” Robbie said, which wasn't technically true, but it was as close as he could articulate. “Dey took a '69 Camaro platfrrm, and dey bveen re-tooleen it for thirrty years. It </span>
  <em>founded</em>
  <span> de unnlimted pro-toureen clazz in the Zilver Ztate Clazzic. Dey hadda make a whole new clazz for that car. It runs two-hundred milez an hour on a </span>
  <em>roadrace.</em>
  <span> They use like three diffnnnt enginz for diffrrrnt race applicationz. For lann-speed I read they run </span>
  <em>methanol</em>
  <span>, with nitrous, blown. Eighteen 'unndrrrd 'orsepowrr!” He took a moment to collect himself. “It's a very famous muscle car,” he summarized.</span>
</p><p>“Its fastest run was two-fifty-eight this year,” Gabe read.</p><p>
  <em>Two-hundred fifty eight miles an hour.</em>
  <span> Robbie pictured the iconic red Camaro with its bold cream racing stripes, gorgeous as the day it was made and breaking records fifty years later. What he wouldn't give to look under that bulging hood, watch them swap out its engine and suspension components from one race trim to another, talk to its driver RJ Gottlieb for thirty seconds. If they let him sit behind the wheel, he'd probably die on the spot.</span>
</p><p>They passed the ugliest roadside statue any of them had ever seen, a hundred-foot-tall concrete pole with big green globes sticking out of crude branches near the top. “Is that grapes?” Gabe asked, leaning across Robbie's center console and squinting.</p><p>“It's probably supposed to be a tree,” Lisa said.</p><p>“Looks like grapes. Or a bunch of kick-balls strapped to a light pole.”</p><p>Robbie agreed.</p><p>They rolled along. Gabe read off names and classification codes and speeds of this year's record-setters, and Robbie offered all the explanation and commentary he could remember from the SCTA website and his favorite racing forums. The dry lake opened up all around them, and Robbie found that if he focused his attention on the desert hills rising in the distance instead of the bumper of the Ranger right in front of him, he could see the individual boulders of the lakeshore miles away, flashing in and out of focus in the rippling heat waves.</p><p>Forty miles later, they saw a sign for the Bonneville Speedway exit, and Robbie stopped himself from another unnecessary burst of speed. As he concentrated on the sensations from the Charger, he noticed an unpleasant and familiar lightness in his gas tank. “Uh, Gabe, how's my gas?”</p><p>Gabe leaned forward and squinted at his console for him. “A little less than a quarter tank.”</p><p>Robbie hummed over the road, his good mood fading. Fuel efficiency had never been a priority for the creators of the Charger, not for Chrysler and obviously not for Tio, but seven miles to the gallon was inconvenient when it wasn't downright nerve-wracking. He'd replaced the twenty-year-old fuel filter that summer when he'd brought it back to life, but Tio's garage hadn't had the lifts he'd needed to drop the tank and clean it out. Who knew how much sludge was in there. “I think we need to keep going, get to town.”</p><p>Gabe wrestled his phone out of his pants pocket and prodded the screen urgently. “But we're almost there.” He squinted. “It's close, we can turn right around and come back—no, wait, Robbie, take the exit! There's a gas station on the way! To your right!”</p><p>Robbie turned his attention to the view in front of him and to the north, and saw a low slope-roofed building and a Sinclair station, no other civilization in sight. He turned off, skidding a bit as he powered through the off-ramp. “You really want to do this?” he asked, keeping his tone calm.</p><p>“Claro,” Gabe assured him. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime destination. All this salt, it's the perfect place to do some, uh, <em>chemistry.</em>”</p><p>Robbie whistled softly.</p><p>“And, and Lisa! You need album art! Where else are you gonna get scenery like this? We'll do a photo shoot! If that's okay.”</p><p>“No, that's, that would be amazing,” Lisa said, tipping her hat back up. “I totally didn't think of that. I'll do my hair and makeup in the gas station. <em>Don't</em> leave without me, okay?”</p><p>“Of course not,” Robbie said, slowing and pulling into the parking lot. It was huge, with enough space between pumps to accommodate a dozen semi-trailers at once. At a smaller gas station, Robbie might worry about banging his mirror on a guard pole or popping off a hubcap against a curb; the Charger turned like a truck, and he felt clumsy in small spaces. Not here. He pulled smoothly around to the pump nearest the station door. He waited while Gabe rolled inside with Lisa to pay for the gas. Lisa jogged back out, unlatched and unscrewed his fuel cap, and stuck the nozzle down the throat of his gas tank. Cold premium rushed in; he could feel it rising up the sides of the sheet metal, the weight compressing the springs of his rear suspension. He thought about asking Lisa to pull it out half-way through, save a little weight, but decided against it. He wasn't exactly racing for money, here.</p><p>Lisa opened his door and reached her arm in toward the back seat, and Robbie folded the front seat forward and out of her way. She jumped. “Oh! Thanks.” She dug a little pink sparkly bag out of her rucksack, and jogged into the gas station, pausing to flash a peace sign at him.</p><p>Gabe rolled as she entered, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses with the price tag dangling in front of his ear and balancing a plastic bag on his lap. He swung himself back inside, holding on by Robbie's seat cushion and headrest, and folded the chair up and heaved it into the back, banging it on Lisa's guitar case. “¿Cómo te sientes?”</p><p>“Bueno. I should be asking you that. Are you sleeping okay?”</p><p>Gabe shrugged. “It's been a rough couple months, strange beds. Don't worry so much. How do you like Lisa? ¿Es linda?”</p><p>Robbie cocked his rearview mirror and stared at him. Gabe wouldn't quite meet his, well, his glass. The gas pump beside them finally shut off and the rush of fuel in his tank slowed and stopped. The shut-off latch in the handle clicked shut, vibrating against his filler neck. “Si...” Robbie said.</p><p>Gabe nodded, rolled his hand through the air. “...You like her?”</p><p>“<span>Are you tryeen to set me up?” Robbie demanded. “Gabe. I'm. I.” </span><em>Brrzzk.</em><span> He snapped the door locks up and down. “Look at me! I'm. Dizz'z not 'n app-rop-riate time to thinnk abvout stuff like that.”</span></p><p>“Ugh! No.” Gabe crossed his arms and tapped his fingers on his elbows. “I mean, later, when...after we figure this out—”</p><p>There was no figuring this out. Robbie didn't have a human body anymore. People weren't like Big Red, they couldn't be rebuilt from scratch after being destroyed in an accident; you got one human body, and once it's gone, that's it for you—unless you were willing to explore the deeply unethical and wildly unsuccessful side of military-grade alchemy, the kind that called for “enemy combatants” as ingredients. Robbie was beyond lucky to still be around.</p><p>“She reminds me of this girl from high school Lit class who sat next to me and kept staring at me all the time,” Robbie said, trying to head off that discussion. “Lisa seems nice, though.” Legs...a leg wasn't the same as a whole person, right? The brain was the really complicated part, but a leg was just bones and muscles. There had to be a way to give Gabe his legs back.</p><p>“Did you ever ask her out?” Gabe asked slowly.</p><p>“Who, Lisa? Of course not. I'm, uh. And she's hitching with us, she's got to get to Coeur-whatever.”</p><p>“No! That girl who kept mooning over you in Lit.”</p><p>“I don't think she liked me,” Robbie admitted. “She was popular or something.”</p><p>“<span>Santo cielo.” Gabe flopped back against Robbie's driver's seat, clapping his hands to his face. “You suck. You suck so much! Of course she </span><em>liked</em><span> you, she was staring at you because she </span><em>liked</em><span> you.”</span></p><p>“You don't know that—”</p><p>“<span>Every girl likes you!” Gabe snapped. “It was traumatizing! Every time a girl wanted to talk to me, they always just wanted to ask me if you were single, and I always had to say yes! I never had a girlfriend until you graduated! And you had some girl </span><em>your own age</em><span>, right there. And you never asked her!”</span></p><p>“I was busy,” Robbie protested. “What about Nita? She was always coming over to our place.”</p><p>“Nita had a crush on you, too. That's the reason she learned D&amp;D, so she had an excuse to come stare at you.”</p><p>Robbie ran the numbers in his head, came to a horrifying conclusion. “She was fourteen!”</p><p>“I know! That's what was so horrible!” Gabe sighed. “She's dating Ty now.”</p><p>“Good for them.” Robbie recalled Nita's small round face watching him across the kitchen table while he laid out frozen french fries on a baking sheet so Gabe's friends would have something to snack on during their endless D&amp;D sessions. “I really wish you hadn't told me that.”</p><p>“Welcome to my world.”</p><p>
  <span>Lisa returned from the gas station, her hair crammed under her cowboy hat, her pink bag swinging. “Ready, guys! Thanks for waiting.” She put the gas nozzle away and buckled in. With her makeup done—eyeliner, and her face looked mysteriously sharper somehow—she </span>
  <em>really</em>
  <span> looked like that red-haired girl from English class. Weird. </span>
</p><p>Robbie started his engine back up and idled for a moment, trying to shake off the horror of learning he'd had an unseen fanclub among Gabe's classmates all through high-school. When he felt steady, he nosed out of the parking lot, and at the main road he revved up until the torque converter locked, and lunged forward, burning his rear tires as he swung North onto the narrow, sunbleached two-lane road that would take him to the fabled Speedway.</p><p>Bonneville Speedway Road extended north from I-80 for about a mile, then east about three more. The speed limit was fifty. Robbie took it in second gear, trying to keep calm, engine loping along easily, but Gabe still had to watch the speedometer for him—“Seventy.” “Seventy again.” “Forty-five, I think you can speed up a little—shit! Seventy!”—until they reached the End of the Road.</p><p>A big round asphalt pad, streaked with gritty white tire tracks, lay before him, and beyond its gentle slope, gleaming white salt stretched out in all directions. Robbie saw an SUV, a RAV-4, parked East of them, a gang of kids playing tag nearby. They were so small in his view, they had to be a mile off. He could make out the rainbows on the smallest girl's shoes. In the corner of his vision, he saw something moving past his side, dark, fast, distorted. He could almost hear the engine note if he concentrated very hard, feeling the vibrations on his right-hand body panels. He couldn't look without turning his entire body, but once he got down on the salt...</p><p>He rolled down.</p><p>The salt below him was crushed into a gray powder and lumped up into ridges by the crowd that had poured onto the flats for this year's Speed Week; the trailer that had held Turbinator II had passed here, and Big Red, and every vehicle from the spectators to the tow-cars to the tourists drawn to the novelty of a driveable landscape, and now it was his turn to join them. The crust was cool and yielding under his tires, and he had a jolt of terror that he would sink right through and they'd be stranded, but the bottom layers held firm, salt and mud hardened like concrete. He crept forward, and as his rear wheels descended onto the lakebed, his field of view rose level again, and he could see the blue sky that stooped startlingly low, the dark rocks and jagged hills in the distance, the broad white lakebed laid out before him, no lanes, no markers, no pedestrians except the family with the SUV. He moved and turned impulsively, trying to look at the unknown vehicle on his right, and his rear end skidded around. Right, traction was terrible. But he could see the moving blob now: it was a motorcycle. The rider was clinging to the handlebars like it was going flat out. The bike seemed to crawl across the endless white.</p><p>Lisa and Gabe shifted inside his cabin, twisting against his seat-backs and brushing their hands over the inside of his doors. “This is so crazy,” Lisa breathed. She had her hat pushed back so she could look down as they rolled further out into the lake, away from the tire tracks. The crystals on the surface rose into a pure sparkling crust like rock candy, over a smooth, strong substrate of hardened cream-colored mud.</p><p>“Where should we go?” Robbie asked them. It was only polite, they couldn't exactly get far without him, but he was hoping, very much, someone would say—</p><p>“Speedway,” Gabe announced, and Robbie revved by accident, rear tires spinning and throwing up salt to rattle against his underside. “North and then Northeast.”</p><p>Robbie opened his throttle more carefully, concentrating to limit the torque at his wheels so his tires wouldn't shear the gritty surface crust right off underneath him. Last year he'd had a back-country road race in the Neon where the surface was almost like this: one of the guys from the local Subaru club had a cousin with property out in the hills, and everyone who hadn't decided to lower their cars and wasn't afraid of a few rocks had driven out one Saturday afternoon to run two miles of private road strewn with sand and gravel. The front-wheel-drive Neon had barely kept up with the WRX's, but considering the mismatch of car to terrain, coming in fourth had been a win. He'd just had to pay attention to the curves, the changing traction conditions underneath, and not ask the car for more braking or acceleration than the dirt under the tires could give back.</p><p>He took a wide sweeping turn until he faced the northern horizon, endless and inviting, blue sky and fleecy clouds as clear before him as though he was lying on his back in the grass of a city park on a spring day. The salt under his nose grew crisp and clean as the tire tracks grew further and further apart, until he rolled over a crackly crust that wrinkled now and then in faint seams where the lake had cracked as it dried. He accelerated, cautious of the limits of traction under his rear wheels, feeling the suspension flex and vibrate as his shocks fought to accommodate the rough surface. A tall orange marker flag rose out of the void ahead, a genuine SCTA mile-marker.</p><p>He headed toward it, exploring the texture and grip of the salt flats, tried some experimental turns—not too wide, so as not to lose sight of the little flag. Salt mounded up under the outside tires front tires, heavy with the weight of the engine, and the rear tires skidded easily over the surface. Speed was what the flats were known for, but drifting may well be what they were made for.</p><p>He felt Lisa grab his door handle hard, and kept his acrobatics tame.</p><p>Up close, the flag turned out to be about ten feet tall. The salt lost its natural geometric ridges as he passed on to the true Speedway, the path of automotive legend, smoothed before competition each summer by heavy steel sledges and then rutted by tires passing over it full speed, each driver and builder and vehicle striving to shatter the limits of possibility. And now he was driving that very path. (Big Red's eighteen-hundred horsepower methanol-gulping nitrous-huffing motor had roared down this same road!) He took his time, watching for potholes that could have emerged from six days of non-stop competition, easing the throttle open gradually as he got a feel for driving on salt. The shift to second gear surprised him. He ignored the whirling planetary gears inside his transmission and focused on the path ahead, coaxed out more speed, felt the salt skipping under his wheels, tested his control. Third gear came, and the transmission locked, direct drive from engine to wheels. He was moving at the speed of gasoline now. Every air-fuel explosion in the big-block V8 might as well be beating against the ground behind him, driving him forward. He let the throttle out, careful, careful. The wheels over the salt droned with vibration. The engine wasn't even straining; this was just a practice run. Just a quick jaunt out to the rocks, get a feel for the track, learn the area.</p><p>The speedway stretched north for five miles, five flags in a row between the gray hills. Beyond the last flag, the salt flats stretched on, endless, as though he could drive forever and disappear into those bright low clouds, but the lakeshore was rising beneath him, rocks and ridges peeking out of the salt, and Robbie realized they were reaching the end of the driveable surface.</p><p>He braked gently. His front wheels dug in and his rear wheels stepped out thirty degrees. Shit. This was why legit racers used parachutes. He let the brakes off instantly, turning into the direction of travel, and when he straightened, he squeezed his brake rotors in short, measured pulses. His transmission dropped back to second, first, and he slowed to a lumpy idle, crawling along the salt. He turned West toward the stony shore.</p><p>“That was so fast,” Lisa exclaimed, sounding a little shaky. Robbie regretted skidding on that stop; he'd gotten it under control, but, well. If you didn't know what you were doing, that was a great way to spin out, roll over, and die. “How fast was that?”</p><p>“About one-ten,” said Gabe, casually.</p><p>
  <em>That's my brother,</em>
  <span> Robbie thought, proud. He'd never driven the Charger so fast since the day of the accident, racing Gabe to the hospital. Today, with nothing to panic about, it felt good: steady power, the high-flow cams breathing well at the high rev rates. He wished he could have brought the Charger to a tuning shop, hitched it up to the dynamometer, put the pedal to the floor, and watched the torque and horsepower curves race up the screen. </span>
</p><p>He probably ought to let Lisa out somewhere, she and Gabe were going to shoot an album cover. He focused his attention back inside his cabin: Gabe in the driver's seat, the base of his pelvis a deep pressure point in the upholstery, his shoulders melting to the seat-back, a wistful smile on his face. Lisa in the passenger seat, elbow digging into the seat-back as she turned outward. He just saw her hazy shape out the corner of his rear-view mirror, which was facing Gabe, and the white glare of the salt against his window hid her from his side mirror. He braked to a stop, rolled his windows down. Took a moment to feel for his wires and speakers, decide what he wanted to say. “Where do you want pictures?” No buzzing, no lag.</p><p>His passengers peered out seriously at the flats. Surreal gleaming plains and forbidding rocky hills dotted with sagebrush stretched out in every direction. Robbie waited, enjoying the throb of the Charger's performance cams at idle. His vision shuddered continually from the vibration.</p><p>“There,” Gabe said at last, pointing to a little island jutting out from the western hills. “There's that huge boulder that'll probably look cool. What do you think?”</p><p>Lisa followed his gaze. “Nice. It looks like we can walk all the way around it. Try out different angles of light.”</p><p>“Point me to it,” Robbie said, wiggling his front wheels so his steering wheel turned. Gabe grabbed hold gently and Robbie followed the pressure toward their chosen desert island, stopping four car-lengths away when he started to feel stones poking through the salt under his tires.</p><p>“I can't believe I ran into a photographer on my Great American Road Trip,” Lisa remarked as she piled her rucksack and her guitar case on the salt.</p><p>“Uh,” Gabe said.</p><p>“He's really good, when he was a kid he used to make these comics with his action figures, he'd take pictures with them all over the house and photoshop speech bvubbles and stuff,” Robbie said.</p><p>“I was thirteen, I wasn't a kid!” Gabe protested. “And they were collectibles. I mean, I got them used, but if they were new, they'd be collectibles.”</p><p>“Ninja Wolf was new. You took him out of the box.”</p><p>“Oh my god, Robbie. Stop!”</p><p>
  <span>Robbie got the suspicion Gabe didn't appreciate this line of reminiscence, but it was a beautiful day and his heart was warm and they were here at the Bonneville Speedway, the real Speedway, and he was about to use the Charger's entire speedometer. “You were so excited. I mean, I thought it'd be the </span>
  <em>iPhone,</em>
  <span> but when you opened him up you couldn't talk for two minutes.”</span>
</p><p>“Stop,” Gabe growled. “I had to—when they—”</p><p>Ninja Wolf was gone, wasn't he. Health and Human Services had taken Gabe after the accident, and Gabe had left with nothing but his backpack when he'd found Robbie.</p><p>“Danny Batista convinced everyone at school that I was a furry,” Gabe yelled.</p><p>Robbie crackled. Lisa covered her mouth.</p><p>“It's not funny.”</p><p>“No, not funny,” Robbie agreed. Lisa wheeled Gabe's chair around and Gabe transferred out to it. “You want me to hang out here?”</p><p>“No, let's test out your phone,” Gabe said. He pulled out his iPhone and called Robbie's Samsung, which began to vibrate against the plastic of Robbie's center console. “C'mon, answer.”</p><p>“Hey Bixby, uh. ¿Qué debo decir?”</p><p>“<span>Creo que la frase es </span><em>accept call,</em><span>” Gabe said. The vibration stopped suddenly. “Go on, say something.”</span></p><p>“Uh, testing, check, one, two,” Robbie said. He strained to angle his driver's side mirror outward, so he could see Gabe properly.</p><p>“It's a little hard to hear you with the engine noise, but it's working,” Gabe said, listening to his phone.</p><p>“Testing, check, one, two,” Robbie repeated, louder. Gabe gave him a thumbs-up. “Hey, Bixby, end call.”</p><p>“Genial.” Gabe backed himself away from Robbie's door, leaned forward and swung it shut. Robbie rolled his window down so he could still hear him. “You go have fun.”</p><p>“Seguro?”</p><p>“Claro. This is your thing.”</p><p>“Alright,” Robbie said. “Call me when you need a ride.”</p><p>“Don't drive off the edge.”</p><p>Robbie backed away from Gabe and Lisa, turned, and stared down the five-mile course. Five orange flags, smaller and smaller in the distance. The road to the speedway, the minivan and the kids, the hummocks and fingers of stone intruding onto the salt from the west, an orange tent with the mosquito net rolled up against its roof, a camper van with mismatched hubcaps, a little stonehenge marking an old campsite, hardy shrubs breaking through the gravel and puffing up through the salt at the very edges of the shore, jagged gray hills that faded row by row into the faint haze of the dry clean desert air, soft white clouds that seemed to skim the ground: worlds and worlds ahead of him. He breathed in, awestruck, and his idle smoothed into a ready hum.</p><p>Robbie gazed at the orange flags that marked the racecourse before him. At Speed Week, you got a whole mile to accelerate as carefully as you liked; two miles for the high-displacement vehicles. The Charger was a high-displacement vehicle, but it should be able to hit its top speed in less than a quarter mile—on hot dry asphalt. Salt was different; Robbie would have to keep his wits about him for this, like last year when he'd run the Neon down that hard, curving gritty track, half-blinded by flying dust, and felt proud to have reached the end without skidding off and rolling down the dry grassy hills. Different course, same mental skill. He'd had to map the sensations of his body onto their source on the car, let the plastic bucket seat jolting against his tailbone become in his mind the imperfections of the road beneath them, let the twist and shudder of the seatback cupping his shoulders become the faintest beginnings of a skid as the tires fought for speed at the limits of traction, let the view through the mirrors and windshield become his whole world and his body just the control mechanism that let him move through it.</p><p>He moved through the world now.</p><p>He breathed in, slowly opening the throttle, letting the torque converter gentle the force of the drive wheels on the gritty lakebed as he accelerated steadily. To his right, the blurred forms of rocks and hills drifted past, while before him, the low sky and far-off mountains and nigh-infinite white lakebed stood still, immutable, inviting. He rolled on, drive wheels pushing, pushing him faster, as the blower began to sing and the engine raced, cams rolling so fast he could feel the rocker covers hum with the snap and click of levers and springs, the V8 climbing toward the peak of its horsepower. And...shift. An uneasy lurch as the drivewheels sped up and skidded on the grit; by reflex he snapped back the throttle and felt the tires grip again, breathed, breathed. A time trial was a negotiation between the car and the track it ran on; the flats could never pay back all the torque the Charger had to give, but they offered time and space to accommodate all its horsepower.</p><p>He hit third gear at half a mile. Cruising gear, as the engineers intended it, but Robbie pushed forward, leaning into that bright blue horizon, breathing, breathing, the rough salt humming beneath him, air buffeting him, drive wheels flinging him toward that first mile marker as his engine roared, shaking his whole body, faster and faster.</p><p>There were no higher gears. Now all the Charger could do to accelerate was turn its engine faster, and he would hit top speed when the engine couldn't take it anymore, when he'd crested the peak of its power curve and was left with the upper limits of speed it could sustain.</p><p>Valve float started just before the first mile, boom-pain-backfire. Robbie eased back the throttle and turned his attention to the combustion array scratched into the hub of his steering wheel, that let him slip into the familiar waking trance of Alchemy. Combustible gasses filled the intake manifold, oxygen and gasoline vapor waiting to flow into empty cylinders, and intake valves struggled to close fast enough to shield the fuel-air mix from the explosions below. He split his mind between the onrushing world and the inner chambers of his engine, became the vapor, commanded the fires to wait their turn. He gasped for more air again, pushed his revs higher, higher, impossibly high, until he felt a warning ache deep within him: piston rods, maybe, or the pistons themselves. He didn't know what modifications the Charger's engine held, forged rods and pistons or, god forbid, stock internals, but he felt the metal straining, and he knew, unshakable, that this was it, this was the limit. He'd raced the hell out of the Charger, let all its horses run.</p><p>Air howled over him, through him; the earth beneath him seemed to buzz as he rushed over it; the spools of his supercharger screamed; his engine roared as it sparked endless puffs of gasoline into explosive power. He passed the second mile, the third, lost in speed and fire. His heart powered him forward into the infinite void, and his soul guarded his heart, and his body flew.</p><p>After the fourth mile marker, he began to close his throttle, stifle his air. His valvetrain caught up with his pistons and fire stopped trying to erupt backward out his cylinders. The desert wind pushed against him, he glided over the salt, shifted down, down, slowed, turned east and then north, away from the raised hump of the road to the south of him. He stopped and stared again into the vast distance, clouds upon clouds in that low, touchable blue sky. Salt stretched away in every direction, no painted lines, no traffic lights, no guardrails, no one to hit. He could go anywhere, any direction, as fast or as slow as he wanted.</p><p>His heart jumped and he moved, rumbling forward to the Northeast over fresh natural salt, broken here and there by tire tracks. He inhaled and skidded and turned, whipping his back end around, making the clouds and hills spin around him. He rolled off, picked up speed, shifted to second, and then poured on power, broke traction, and skated over the salt in long, smooth, S-shaped arcs, then he eased up and raced off again, more gradually, <em>breathe, breathe, breathe,</em> until he lost his grip on the un-ploughed surface and had to ease back down. He could do anything he could imagine doing with a car here. He'd never felt so free.</p><p>
  <em>I've got to take the Neon up here someday,</em>
  <span> he thought, and then he remembered.</span>
</p><p>The Neon belonged to Roberto Reyes, and Roberto Reyes was presumed dead. It had probably been sold for scrap: stripes, racing seats, turbo, and all. The Neon was gone. And even if the Neon wasn't gone, Robbie would never sit behind the wheel again, never put his feet on the pedals or his hand on the shifter, upgrade the transmission or test-drive the result. Robbie idled, suddenly, intimately aware of his body, the hiss of coolant in his radiator, the slosh of liquid in his gas tank, the weight of his frame on his springs. He loved machines. He loved learning how they worked, and fixing them, and seeing what they could do. And now the Charger was the only machine he would ever know.</p><p>He still had alchemy, fire. He focused on his combustion array, called out to the water vapor and CO2 in the air, the unburned hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides escaping his tailpipe, reached through the earth for the limitless energy of the San Andreas fault and the magma pushing up beneath the rising Rockies, and ripped the molecules above him into their component atoms, reaching and tearing and gathering the volatile gasses into the largest cloud of invisible chemical potential energy he'd ever dared make. Just as the wind pushed it in front of his nose, before he lost his grip completely, he snapped an arc from his spark plug wires and lit the whole thing up.</p><p>That was a fifty-foot fireball. It flashed orange in the smeary vision of his windshield, boomed against his body panels, and vanished, inert, into the atmosphere. If Robbie were a firebug, he'd have come from watching it. If he were a chemist, he'd be mad with power and go around ripping oxygen atoms out of water molecules everywhere he went for the dizzy joy of it. But he wasn't. He'd just wanted a cheap way to help the Neon go fast. And now, ripping atoms apart with his alchemy to watch them slam explosively back together was the only positive proof he had that he wasn't, actually, a poorly-programmed racing computer.</p><p>He realized he'd lost sight of Gabe.</p><p>His engine raced as he searched the flats ahead of him, his drive wheels spun, he could see every cloud for a hundred miles but not his brother—no, he was facing Northeast, and he'd left Gabe and Lisa past the northern-most marker flag near the Western shore. It was hard to remember how narrow his distance vision was when so many miles of landscape stretched out before him. He had to turn West. He slowed his engine and let his wheels catch, rolled off in an easy arc to the Northwest, saw the flags, saw the shore, accelerated. Second, third. He swept his attention from rock to rocky island on the northwest shore, the rocks growing larger as he ate up the miles, until he spotted a standing human form, Lisa with her hat and guitar, her silhouette concealed by an outcrop rising behind her. Gabe was nearby, in front of those same rocks. They were watching him.</p><p>Relief. His engine raced on hot and fast as ever, but the rhythm he perceived in it changed completely, from frantic thrash-metal to a giddy ska beat. He rolled close, slowed cautiously on the grit. Gabe waved, Lisa dipped her guitar at him. Robbie rolled down his windows and lifted his wiper blades.</p><p>“<span>Buen idea, ¿no?” Gabe asked, smug. </span></p><p>No curbs, no lines on the ground to divide them. Robbie nosed closer, closer, until his front bumper stopped just two feet from Gabe's chair. He had a microscopic view of the knotted-up legs of Gabe's jeans. He idled, vibrating on his springs, almost within Gabe's reach, then backed up until he could see Gabe's face and parked.</p><p>“You looked great out there,” Lisa called, as though he'd been skateboarding. She'd let her hair down from where she'd crammed it under her hat at the gas station, and it brushed her shoulders in chunky waves.</p><p>“Thanks,” Robbie said, still idling. He didn't want to shut his engine down, not until he'd had the chance to calm himself and appreciate what he had today.</p><p>He could use his body to its fullest potential.</p><p>He could move anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted, in any direction he wanted.</p><p>He could be with Gabe—not carrying him to some ten-story building, not crawling up into the grass beside a picnic bench at a rest stop to watch Gabe eat lunch, not standing in a parking lot while Gabe, also, sat in the lot in his very vulnerable and inconspicuous chair while other cars lurched back and forth behind him, their careless drivers on the hunt for parking spaces—they could just hang out together, side by side, sharing the same space. The salt flats welcomed both of them.</p><p>This was the best day Robbie may ever have again.</p><p>He shut his engine off. Whatever emotion had been about to hit him, didn't.</p><p>“This was a great idea,” he told Gabe, calm. “I got to shake-down the Charger. You get good pictures?”</p><p>“Mas o menos.” Gabe held out an unfamiliar cell phone in front of Robbie's left headlight and flicked through a gallery: pictures of Lisa, some with the flats and sky for backdrop, some with the rocks behind her, various poses with the guitar. One had captured her in mid-air, clicking the heels of her boots together, the brim of her hat hiding her face. The bright sun should have washed out the detail with deep shadows, but the white salt underfoot illuminated her from below.</p><p>“How'd you get those angles?” Robbie asked, noticing some of the shots seemed to have come from above.</p><p>“Selfie stick.”</p><p>Lisa approached them, tilted her hat up. “Uh, what was that explosion back there?”</p><p>
  <span>Unlicensed military alchemy. Robbie caught the panicked look on Gabe's face. </span>
  <em>Brzzz—“</em>
  <span>Flamethrower,” he said.</span>
</p><p>Lisa raised her eyebrow. “What? Why?”</p><p>“It's experimental,” Robbie said primly.</p><p>“So you can cook your competition?”</p><p>That was the most ridiculous thing Robbie had ever heard. “It's for the fans,” he explained, in a bolt of inspiration. “It looks awesome. It has to be big so they can see it at the end of the drag strip.”</p><p>“It does look awesome,” Lisa admitted. “Say, hoss,” —that ear-scorching Country accent again— “any chance you'd like to be on the cover of my upcoming album?”</p><p>Gabe frowned. “Only if Robbie's okay with it.”</p><p>Robbie remembered those weeks back home, practicing alchemy and reviving the Charger back at Tio's abandoned garage, toting in fifty gallons of water so he could detail it out on the driveway on one of LA's rare cloudy days. He remembered how its black flanks had gleamed after he'd buffed off the wax, how the stainless steel air intake and chrome trim had sparkled after a good polish. On a sunny day, against Bonneville's perfect white backdrop, it must be rolling art. “I bet I could do a donut and a fireball at the same time,” he offered.</p><p>Lisa clutched her hands under her chin. “Ohmigod. Wait, wait. I don't know—that might be a bit too rock'n'roll for my brand—”</p><p>If Robbie's engine were on, he was pretty sure he'd be feeling disappointed and vaguely insulted.</p><p>“Who am I kidding, I don't have a <em>brand,</em>” Lisa finished. “That'd be so amazing if you'd do that.”</p><p>Robbie started back up, engine rocking him with stored melancholy. He waited to settle down a bit before releasing his parking brake. “Wait. How are you gonna explain why there's no driver?”</p><p>“I'll say it's photoshop.”</p><p>Lisa used her phone as a mirror to check her hair and makeup, then waved for Robbie to roll off onto the flats behind her. His phone buzzed when he got about a hundred feet away.</p><p>“Hey, Bixby, accept call.”</p><p>It was Gabe. “Okay, good distance, now head off a bit to your right—no, sorry, your left. Keep going, keep going—good. Okay, do your thing, keep your spin as tight as you can, try to throw up lots of salt, do your fireball whenever. Lisa's gonna hold the pose. Ready?”</p><p>“Ready,” Robbie said, and he breathed in and skidded over the salt, his heart roaring, carving his tiretracks into the wasteland.</p>
<hr/><p>According to Bixby, it was eleven forty-five when they left the salt. The sun was high in the sky, and the warm fall morning was growing hot; Gabe and Lisa sipped the last of the water they'd brought as Robbie carried them back to the sloping asphalt pad at the head of Bonneville Speedway Road.</p><p>He pushed himself up onto the hard hot asphalt, shedding salt from the tread of his tires as he went, and he noted the lanes marked out for him on the narrow causeway and aligned himself to roll between them. A steep drop waited to either side. Speed limit fifty. This afternoon, he would run north, probably head back East a bit to correct for their detour, burn a couple tanks of gas, and at last park outside some motel room all night, waiting for Gabe to come out so he could drive him somewhere else. If they ever found Tio, then Gabe could sleep in his house, on a sofa or the floor, or maybe Tio might lend him his bed because Gabe was injured, and Robbie would wait, hopefully under a carport, until Gabe needed him to drive somewhere.</p><p>“Can I see the photos?” he asked.</p><p>Gabe, dozing in his driver's seat, pointed Lisa toward Robbie's rear-view mirror. “Hold it up so he can see.”</p><p>Lisa displayed her phone obligingly, scrolling the last few images up and down the screen. Lisa's face was shadowed by her hat, but the sun bouncing up from below revealed her features: soft jaw, stern mouth, eyes studying the distance. The shining white landscape behind her threw her into contrast, and to the side, just below the upturned neck of her guitar, Robbie saw the Charger in a hard spin, a rooster-tail of salt obscuring its rear license-plate. Above them both, like a sun or a halo, bloomed a great curling cloud of yellow flame. He wasn't sure what genre of music the photo evoked, but it was the only image he could imagine that might persuade him to buy a Country album.</p><p><em>That's me,</em> he thought, staring at the classic muscle car in the picture. <em>That's what I look like now.</em> “Nice,” he said to Lisa and Gabe. In the photo, white salt caked the Charger's black flanks where his wheels had flung it up at himself. It itched inside his wheel wells and roughened the wind gliding over his sides. “Uh, I hate to ask this, but. This is a really pristine restomod, and the salt, if it sits on the steel...Lisa, would you...hose me off?”</p><p>“I was wondering about that,” she said. “No probs.”</p><p>Gabe shifted his hips and shoulders as he dug his phone out of his pants pocket. “There's a self-service car wash in Wendover.”</p><p>Robbie passed the Sinclair station, took the westbound I-80 on-ramp, breathed in, accelerated with a smooth steady shove of rubber on tarmac. He signaled, merged, picked a following distance of about a thousand feet behind a horse trailer with two spotted rumps visible above the door. He watched the horses shift on their feet and twitch their tails. He wondered what it was like to be a horse.</p><p>Just beyond the western hills of the Great Salt Lake Desert was Wendover, Utah—a tiny truck-stop of a town with a few homes, fast food restaurants, and billboards advertising the casinos a mile down the road in West Wendover, Nevada. Robbie spotted the sign for the car wash and turned off Main Street, pulled in to one of the four broad concrete bays the facility offered, over the slippery steel grate in the cement and under the steel roof. Each wall had a rack of hoses and nozzles. Gabe sorted through his cash and dug out a handful of carefully-selected small bills, probably change broken from his alchemized twenties, to feed into the machine on the wall and turn on the pressure washer.</p><p>“I'll make it up to you somehow,” Gabe said. “I should've realized—but Robbie, he, um. He had to shake down the engine. New, um, mods.”</p><p>“Don't worry about it,” Lisa said. “Seriously.” She looked forward and frowned. “Uh. What am I supposed to do about that big metal thing? The blower?”</p><p>“Leave it alone,” Robbie said. “It's not the end of the world if a little water gets on it, but that's my air intake. Don't aim the nozzle at it. But, the wheel wells and the undercarriage, those are really important...”</p><p>“The metal nooks and crannies down there. I got you.”</p><p>“Thanks.”</p><p>She shut the door and left, fed bills into the machine on the wall. Outside, an air compressor roared to life. Lisa selected the water sprayer, aimed at his front quarter panel, and pulled the trigger. Water boomed against the sheet metal, a shock of cold and noise. She fanned the spray up and down his flank, scraping the salt away, a sensation somewhere between someone else combing his hair and chewing on tinfoil. Then she moved in on his wheel well, water slicing through the caked-on salt and spattering against his brakes and suspension, adding the delightful impressions of peeling off a scab and shuffling bare feet over a shoe-cleaner brush.</p><p>Robbie turned his attention inward and pointed his rear-view mirror at his driver's seat. Gabe's hair was stringy with sweat, and he massaged his thighs, one by one, as he leaned hard into Robbie's seatback, not even watching Lisa work. His lips were thin. The hospital wheelchair set him much more upright than the driver's seat did, which had to put more pressure on his hipbones, and he still hadn't shaken off the exhaustion he'd worn this morning. “Gabe,” Robbie said, and stopped himself. <em>You shouldn't have. We didn't need to. We could have pushed on, we could be half-way to Boise now.</em> Instead he said, just loud enough to be heard above the pressure washer outside him, “Thanks.”</p><p>Gabe looked up at his mirror and smiled, shy. “Thought you'd like it.”</p><p>“Por cierto. Lo pasé increíble.” He watched Gabe, even as he thought of the Speedway just ten minutes behind them: forty square miles of absolute freedom, at least in the summer. Outside his body, Lisa had moved to his rear quarter panel and wheel well; in his side mirror he watched her shoulders shifting as she worked the spray nozzle up and down, saw her bend at the waist to peer under his fender. “Thanks. And.” Had he told Gabe this? “Thanks for saving me. I'm glad I'm...still here.”</p><p>Gabe looked out the window, at the opposite wall, then down at his lap. He covered his face with his elbow and nodded jerkily.</p><p>Oh no. How to make this better. “If someone had offered me,” he sent a higher frequency to his speaker wires, “<em>Hey, how'd you like to be a car for a week,</em> o por quizás un mes. Or two months—might be a little boring, but. You know. I'd jump at the chance. I'm learning so much. I could be a better mechanic, I'm already a better driver. I wish I could tell the guys at work what this is like. It's an experience.”</p><p>“Robbie,” Gabe said shakily. “No tienes que mentir—I'm sorry—”</p><p>“Really.” Robbie crackled, tilted his passenger side mirror inward as Lisa finished that side and walked around to the other one. His paint looked clean. Lisa would finish up soon, and Robbie needed to say his piece and give Gabe time to collect himself before she got back in. “I'll be okay if we can't fix this,” he said, to Gabe and to himself, “but I'll help you, haré todo lo que pueda para ayudar. I mean, I don't know as much theory as you, I pretty much fell down the flame alchemy rabbit-hole while you were still trying to master every single field, but I've got Bixby now and I don't sleep. I'll research, I'll read, I'll do the boring shit. If we can find a way, I'll do it, whatever I can. Not just getting your legs back: everything. You can count on me.”</p><p>Gabe flattened his palm against the plastic panel of Robbie's left door and squeezed. Robbie wished he could squeeze back; tightening Gabe's shoulder-belt would strangle him at this angle. With effort, he wiggled his shocks slightly, rocking his chassis. “I kind of thought,” Gabe said, his voice low and choked, “you might be punishing yourself. Because I got hurt. Even though you got hurt a lot worse.”</p><p>“I'm not hurt,” Robbie insisted. “But. This is seriously starting to get old. I. If it's possible, and I'm okay if it isn't—I'd really like to be a person again.”</p><p>“You <em>are</em> a person,” Gabe snarled, raising his face from the crook of his elbow. “You'll always be a person.”</p><p>“Claro.” He was, a ghost was a person, an artificial intelligence was a person; whatever Robbie was now, he just wasn't generally recognized as a person by other people. “Thanks. But your legs come first.”</p><p>“¡Santos! Robbie, I'm fine!” Gabe snapped.</p><p>Robbie made a low, doubtful whistle.</p><p>“It's hard to do everything, and—I have to watch for doors, and ramps, and cracks, and I can't go on the grass, and I can't reach shit, and—and bathrooms, and stupid stuff, like, that gas station back there, the sunglasses tower didn't have any mirrors down low so I don't know if my glasses look dorky on me. I had to ask Lisa. And it always feels like my toes are curled and I can't straighten them and it's driving me crazy. But I can live my life. I can talk to people, I can eat and sleep, nobody's gonna...<em>park me</em> on their front lawn under a tarp, <em>shit,</em> Robbie!”</p><p>“It's not a contest,” Robbie said. “We're both pretty fucked up, though.”</p><p>Gabe stared up at Robbie's mirror, blinking hard, then shook his head and looked out the window, away from Robbie's mirrors and away from Lisa. “Thanks for being honest.”</p><p>“I'd never lie to you.”</p><p>Gabe snorted. “Sure you wouldn't.”</p><p>Robbie watched a livestock truck pass behind them on Main Street, followed by a long procession of pick-up trucks of various makes and ages. Lisa circled back around him, bent down low and sprayed his undercarriage. Robbie hoped this wasn't what driving in the rain was going to feel like. She hung up the nozzle and sat back down, peered back and forth between Gabe and Robbie's radio. “You okay?”</p><p>“Hungry,” Gabe said, scrubbing his face on his shirt. “Where's the snacks? I want my spicy pickle.”</p><p>“Thank-you, Lisa,” Robbie said as she buckled in.</p><p>“Yeah, thanks again.”</p><p>“It's no problem, I told you.” Lisa bent down and fished a plastic bag out from under Robbie's passenger seat. She handed Gabe a lumpy green cylinder sealed in a clear pouch, and opened a plastic-wrapped sandwich for herself.</p><p>“Pickle?” Robbie asked. “What—”</p><p>“It looked weird, so I bought it,” Gabe explained. He opened it carefully, rolled down Robbie's window, and poured half the pickle juice out onto the concrete, then took a bite. “Thas diffrnt,” he muttered.</p><p>“¿Te gusta?”</p><p>Gabe swallowed. “No sé.” He took another bite, frowning and tilting his head back and forth. “It's really tangy.”</p><p>Robbie started his engine back up, put himself in Drive, and rolled through the car wash and back toward Main Street, turned right. The only pickles he could remember eating were the thin slices that came mashed into the bun of a McDonald's hamburger. He tried to imagine what it must be like to eat an entire unsliced pickle, how to nip it into chunks with his front teeth and crush it into pulp with his molars, the vinegar smell, the texture. Tangy was a kind of sour, but the nuance escaped him at the moment.</p><p>Lisa handed Gabe a paper towel from the bag. “Um, Robbie. I've been wondering...stop me if I'm out of line here, but you and Gabe, some of the things you say—”</p><p>Mierda. He was the least-convincing artificial intelligence ever. Robbie braced himself.</p><p>“Did you used to be a Roomba or something?”</p><p>Gabe coughed. Gasped, choked, coughed harder, hacked something up into the paper towel.</p><p>Lisa winced. “Sorry, it just...the things you know, and the way you guys are with each-other...it sounds like you used to live inside Gabe's house.”</p><p>Robbie watched Gabe with his mirror, waiting for some sort of cue. Gabe just stared back at him, clearing his throat over and over and clutching his pickle bag. “Yeah,” Robbie said at last. “I used to be a Roomba.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Ringworld</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>If the tone or details here seem off, it's because I actually wrote this part about two years ago, before I'd actually bit the bullet and made a multichapter fic of this. So, sorry. Also, my geography may be wrong. My thought process at this stage was literally just, "ROAD TRIP!!!!"</p>
<p>There's a time skip. I'm sure Gabe and Robbie had some adventures in Idaho, investigating Elijah Royal's old woodchipper rental yard that is now an incredibly fertile organic berry farm, maybe street-raced some hooligans and lit them on fire for cheating, but I don't know exactly and I want to get straight to the bad parts now.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They pulled into the rest area, on the border between Wyoming and Kansas. The land was flattening out, the roads straight. Descending from the endless heights of the Rocky Mountains, they could see ahead of them infinite fields stretching into the East.</p>
<p>"Ringworld," Gabe remarked as Robbie opened his passenger-side door so Gabe could unload his chair.</p>
<p>Robbie made a crackly squawk through the radio. He'd wanted to say <em>huh?</em> but he wasn't thinking it through: how it sounded, as opposed to how it used to feel to say it. Over a month, and he was still getting the hang of this <em>talking car</em> thing. "What do you mean?" he asked.</p>
<p>"That book, Ringworld," Gabe grunted, shifting himself onto the passenger seat and lifting the folded wheelchair out of the footwell. "That's what the horizon looks like. Like it's rising in front of us."</p>
<p>"You're right," Robbie said, thinking back. The ground never cut off; just sort-of faded into the distant haze. He waited, powerless, while Gabe struggled to get the chair opened and locked, and then held his door just so, so Gabe could support himself on it while he lowered the healing stumps of his thighs down into it. Then he watched through his mirrors and lights and windows as Gabe wheeled himself into the restroom, alone. Three hundred and sixty degrees of vision and all he could see was his brother.</p>
<p>He waited. Played with the tuner on the radio, not running power to the speakers, but just listening. An apocalyptic gospel station. Ranchera. Rock 'n Roll. He tuned into the Ranchera station; it was cheesy as hell, but it made him think of Mom.</p>
<p>Gabe returned from the bathroom after what felt like half an hour. He'd refilled some water bottles. "Alright. Think dinner's cooked?"</p>
<p>Robbie opened up his hood so Gabe could look in, lean against the insect-encrusted chrome grill, and retrieve a package of aluminum foil he'd left on Robbie's engine block. Robbie waited, his mind thrumming with anxiety but his body unmoving, while Gabe leaned over all those hot metal parts.</p>
<p>Gabe hissed. Robbie revved his starter motor, and Gabe yelped. "You scared the shit out of me! I almost dropped the potato!"</p>
<p>"Sorry, I'm sorry," Robbie said through the radio, and then he rolled down one window so he could repeat himself. "I just--never mind. Rough week."</p>
<p>"Rough <em>week?</em>" Gabe demanded, laughing. "You can put the hood down, I got it."</p>
<p>Robbie slowly lowered the hood, saw Gabe grinning over it, a tinfoil bundle held between thumb and forefinger.</p>
<p>"This is the greatest week of my life," Gabe said.</p>
<p>Robbie wondered how he might make a skeptical expression. He raised his wiper blades halfway.</p>
<p>"I mean. It's awful. This is awful. But you and me, I feel like we're, like we've escaped, sabes? Both of us."</p>
<p>Robbie put his wiper blades back down. Gabe looked around, looked at the picnic table separated from the parking lot by a scraggly grass lawn, and dropped the aluminum packet on the pavement. "Don't eat on the ground, jesus," Robbie said.</p>
<p>"I'm not eating in the, uh, you," said Gabe. He circled around to Robbie's trunk, and Robbie opened that so Gabe could lean in and pull out his utensils and an old fleece blanket.</p>
<p>"You could," Robbie said. "I don't mind."</p>
<p>Gabe lowered a longsuffering look into Robbie's brakelight. "You do, too. And besides. I've got to sleep there."</p>
<p>And so Gabe sat on the concrete, eating potatoes and carnitas Robbie had cooked on his engine, while Robbie stared off at the faded horizon and back at the rising mountains, his brother tucked close against him in his blind spot, feeling his engine cool and the coolant condense in his radiator.</p>
<p>"Two more states until we get to Tio Elias' farm," Gabe remarked. "He'll be surprised to see us."</p>
<p>Robbie thought back over the decade-plus they'd both spent in foster care in East Los Angeles. "He'd better be."</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Family Farm</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Bad part starts now!!!! &gt;:D</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>They'd followed Tio's trail of properties from Eli Morrow's garage in Los Angeles, East to the Eliot Miller's haunted house in Albuquerque, North to Elijah Royal's woodchipper rental service in Boise and now they'd crossed the Rockies and zig-zagged through endless cornfields and nameless state roads to turn off onto the gravel drive of Yeli Moroz's organic pig farm in Iowa.</p>
<p>“I see pigs,” Robbie said. Behind the fence was a single-wide manufactured home and a cluster of buildings and silos, galvanized-steel cylinders, a few spotted pink-and-black hogs lolling in the dust behind a fence. “Maybe he's here.”</p>
<p>“He could at least pick up the phone,” Gabe grumbled, glaring at the padlocked cattle gate blocking the drive.</p>
<p>“I'll honk,” Robbie warned him, and then let loose with the Charger's horrible human scream that sounded far more realistic than Robbie had yet managed when he synthesized his own voice. Gabe winced. Robbie gave the horn three long blasts, paused, waited. “What time is it?”</p>
<p>“Six forty-three.”</p>
<p>“Maybe he's cooking dinner.”</p>
<p>They stared at the house, the pigs shuffling around in the small paddocks near the barns, the crows perched on top of the outbuildings. “I'm honking again,” Robbie announced, and screamed some more.</p>
<p>The front door of the single-wide opened and a man burst out onto the porch.</p>
<p>It was hard to make him out in the shadow of the house, but his clothes were dark, and when he pushed himself away from the porch railing, he moved slow, shuffling. Gabe had a sudden fear that they'd missed Tio again: Tio was younger than Dad, and Dad would have been only sixty. The man got in the driver's seat of a little garden utility cart, started the engine, and drove down to the gate. He dismounted the cart slowly and approached the padlock on the gate as Gabe rolled down Robbie's driver's side window. Now that he was closer, Gabe's hope rose again—this man didn't <em>look</em> old; he had dark hair—though it could be dyed—and his face was deeply lined but not shriveled. He wore a faded black suit with a collared shirt open to show off a heavy gold chain around his neck, and as he tipped his head this way and that, examining Gabe, his gaze was heavy and sharp. “Is that Tio?” Gabe asked Robbie, and Robbie make a noncommittal whistle. Made sense, Robbie had been little when Mom and Dad disappeared and Tio with them.</p>
<p>“What you doing with that car?” the man demanded. He had a weird accent, middle-American by way of TV reruns.</p>
<p>“Are you Elias Reyes?” Gabe yelled, and the man reached under his jacket and aimed a pistol at his face.</p>
<p>“Who's asking?”</p>
<p>Robbie revved so hard the Charger shook. The sun was in Gabe's eyes and he couldn't see the man's expression, could barely make out the gun. Robbie's gear selector slammed into reverse, and Gabe grabbed it, not to yank it out of gear, but enough to tell Robbie he wasn't ready to back away yet. “Tio!” Gabe yelled. “I'm your nephew! Alberto and Juliana's son!”</p>
<p>The man's head tipped almost to his shoulder and he lowered the gun slightly. “<em>Robbie?</em>”</p>
<p>“Robbie's my older brother,” Gabe said. He stopped himself from saying more; it wasn't in the plan to come right out with the <em>Robbie's soul is trapped in your car</em> bombshell. “I'm Gabe. Gabriel Reyes.”</p>
<p>“The <em>fetus?</em>” the man exclaimed. He stared at them a minute more, aim wavering over the ground, and at last disappeared the pistol back under his armpit and unlocked the gate. He stepped around to the driver's seat, braced his hands on his knees, and leaned down. This close Gabe saw that his black hair <em>was </em>dyed, graying roots, and his nose was large and somehow lopsided. He smelled like bacon and the same spiced aftershave the Charger had smelled like when Robbie had first uncovered it in the garage. “Huh. You could be Robbie. Same weird eyes.”</p>
<p>He was one to talk; the man had the palest brown eyes Gabe had ever seen, verging on yellow. He laughed nervously. “It's Gabe. And you're Tio Maldito?”</p>
<p>The man straightened, then staggered half a step. “Haven't heard that in a few,” he grunted. “Call me Eli. Or Tio. And I suppose there's a reason you tracked me down and brought my car back.”</p>
<p>A reason? Gabe could hardly think of a reason <em>not</em> to. “You're family,” he said. “Of course we looked you up.” Robbie cautiously flicked his gear selector into Drive and let his engine chug at a low idle.</p>
<p>“Surprise visit?” Tio checked.</p>
<p>“I called ahead.”</p>
<p>“Oh.” He blinked at Gabe, then looked back and forth up the empty road. “Who else knows you're here?”</p>
<p>“Nobody.”</p>
<p>“Huh.” Tio shuffled to the gate and gave it a perfunctory swing; it creaked halfway across the driveway and then stopped. “How 'bout you hop out and get the gate for me and we'll trade wheels.”</p>
<p>Robbie rumbled, and Gabe winced. “I, uh, I'm sorry.”</p>
<p>Tio scowled at him and reached his right hand under his jacket—he had to have an itch, he couldn't be reaching for his gun— “It's my car.”</p>
<p>Gabe gave Robbie's wheel a squeeze. The soul-seal talk would be very awkward. “I'd have to get my wheelchair.” He licked his lips; this was as good a way to breach the point as any. “We had an Alchemy accident and I lost my legs.”</p>
<p>Tio shuffled back to Robbie's window and looked in, as though Gabe might be pranking him. “Alchemy accident.”</p>
<p>“Equivalent exchange.”</p>
<p>“Huh.” Tio rested his hand on Robbie's roof, stared down at the stumps of Gabe's legs. He swayed from side to side, silently, then met Gabe's eyes with a wide grin. “Long trip? Follow me. I got a couch and I got food; I'll get you fed and rested and we can talk Alchemy accidents in the morning.” He pushed off from Robbie and shuffled over to the gate, slowly pushed it the rest of the way open.</p>
<p>“Sorry I can't help,” Gabe called.</p>
<p>Tio waved him off. “I <em>got</em> it, kid. Go park in front of the machine shop. I'll meet you at the house.”</p>
<p>Robbie crackled his speakers softly. “What'd he say?”</p>
<p>“He said to park over by the machine shop.” Gabe pointed, then remembered that Robbie couldn't see inside his cabin that well except what his mirrors were facing, and he guided Robbie up the driveway and over the mud and gravel toward a big metal pole-barn that cast long shadows over the weeds. At last Robbie stopped and shut off his engine, and Gabe let out a shuddery breath. Their trip was finally over. They'd found their family—they <em>had </em>family. And they hadn't crashed or gotten arrested or kidnapped or lost or run out of money or anything; Gabe hadn't screwed this up. “We made it.”</p>
<p>A whistle of agreement.</p>
<p>“You gonna be okay out here all night?”</p>
<p>Robbie was still and silent, and then he said, “There's room in the shop to get my hood under cover if it rains. Call me if...<em>lllllll</em>...We don't know Tio that well. Call me if there's a problem. And can you tell him about me tonight or tomorrow? I've got stuff to ask him about, too.”</p>
<p>“I'm gonna have to. He thinks you're his car.”</p>
<p>Robbie buzzed a bit like he was going to say something, then he went <em>boo-woop</em> and fell silent again. Gabe got to work hauling his wheelchair out the door and gathering his papers and stuffing them in his backpack and unplugging Robbie's new phone so he could strap it to the headrest of the driver's seat where Robbie could see it, and by the time he was done with all of this, Tio had pulled up on his garden cart and was squinting at them in the slanting sunlight. Gabe put his hands to his wheels and shoved himself over the uneven ground, toward the stairs he wouldn't be able to ascend without help, from the shadow of the pole-barn to the shadow of the double-wide, where he smelled bacon cooking.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>